PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 WHAT DOES 10 IT MEAN TO BE 11 POST-­SOVIET? 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 To prevent piracy 37 and protect this 38 intellectual property, please do not circulate or forward this PDF. Delete it when you are done with it.

218-73357_ch00_1P.indd 1 1/16/18 5:24 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 8 9 10 11 ON DECOLONIALITY a series edited by 12 walter d. mignolo and catherine e. walsh 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

218-73357_ch00_1P.indd 2 1/16/18 5:24 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 WHAT DOES DECOLONIAL ART 9 IT MEAN TO BE FROM THE RUINS OF 10 11 POST-­SOVIET? THE SOVIET EMPIRE 12 13 14 15 Madina Tlostanova 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 Duke University Press Durham and London 2018 38

218-73357_ch00_1P.indd 3 1/16/18 5:24 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 © 2018 Duke University Press All rights reserved 21 Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞ 22 Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan 23 Typeset in Whitman and Trade Gothic by Westchester Publishing Services 24 25 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data 26 Names: Tlostanova, M. V. (Madina Vladimirovna), author. 27 Title: What does it mean to be post-­Soviet? : decolonial art from the 28 ruins of the Soviet empire / Madina Tlostanova. 29 Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Series: On decoloniality | Includes bibliographical references and index. 30 Identifiers: lccn 2017054363 (print) | lccn 2017056841 (ebook) 31 isbn 9780822371632 (ebook) 32 isbn 9780822371342 (hardcover : alk. paper) 33 isbn 9780822371274 (pbk. : alk. paper) 34 Subjects: lcsh: Postcolonialism and the arts—­Former Soviet 35 republics. | Post-­communism—­Social aspects—­Former Soviet republics. | Art—­Political aspects—­Former Soviet republics. 36 Classification: lcc nx180.p67 (ebook) | lcc nx180.p67 t56 37 2018 (print) | ddc 700/.4—­dc23 38 lc rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2017054363

218-73357_ch00_1P.indd 4 1/16/18 5:24 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 contents 12 13 14 15 Acknowl­edgments vii 16 17 INTRODUCTION A Futureless Ontology? ​1 18 19 CHAPTER ONE The Decolonial Sublime ​25 20 21 CHAPTER TWO Decolonial Aesthesis 22 and Post-­Soviet Art 33 23

CHAPTER THREE A ­Woman Who Has Many Selves 24 and Takes Over Many Spaces: 25 A Conversation with Liina Siib 65 26 27 CHAPTER FOUR Beyond Dependencies: A Talk with 28 Vyacheslav Akhunov, the Lonely Ranger 29 of Uzbek Con­temporary Art ​84 30 31 CHAPTER FIVE Reflecting on ime,T Space, and Memory 32 with Afanassy Mamedov ​106 33 34 CONCLUSION ­People Are ­Silent . . . 119 35 36 Notes ​ 129 37 References ​ 135 38 Index ​ 000

218-73357_ch00_1P.indd 5 1/16/18 5:24 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

218-73357_ch00_1P.indd 6 1/16/18 5:24 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 acknowl­edgments 12 13 14 15 I warmly thank Catherine Walsh and Walter Mignolo, the coeditors of this 16 impor­tant and timely book series at Duke University Press, for inviting me 17 to publish one of its first volumes. I also thank Walter Mignolo, Pedro Pablo 18 Gómez, and Rolando Vázquez for inviting me to write a series of articles 19 on decolonial aesthesis in their edited collections and journals, including 20 Calle 14, Estéticas y opción decolonial, Arte y estética en la encrucijada descolo- 21 nial, and Social Text Periscope, and for giving me a chance to share my ideas 22 and intuitions on the artistic and existential manifestations of the imperial 23 difference at the annual Decolonial Summer Schools “Stolen Memories: 24 Museums, Slavery and (De)coloniality” (2015) and “What Does It Mean to 25 ‘Decolonize’? Introducing the Decolonial Option” (2016) in Middelburg, 26 the Netherlands. 27 I also cordially thank Sabine Broeck from the University of Bremen for 28 inviting me to participate in a number of impor­tant conferences and sem- 29 inars on decoloniality and postcolonial critique, among them the edited 30 collection with Carsten Junker, Postcoloniality—­Decoloniality—­Black Cri- 31 tique: Joints and Fissures (2014), which allowed me to formulate some of 32 the issues addressed in this book. 33 I thank the colleagues from Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Romania, and Slo- 34 vakia with whom I have collaborated on dif­fer­ent book and journal projects­ 35 and conferences on the intersections of the post-­socialist and postcolonial 36 experience. Our discussions and debates wer­ e very helpful for the gesta- 37 tion of this book. In par­tic­u­lar, I thank Dorota Kołodziejczyk, who invited 38

218-73357_ch00_1P.indd 7 1/16/18 5:24 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th me to participate in the “On Colonialism, Communism and East-­Central 2 ­Eu­rope: Some Reflections” special issue of theJournal of Postcolonial hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 ­Writing, which she coedited with Cristina Sandru. I express my gratitude hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 to ­Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfric for inviting me to give a keynote hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 speech at their conference “Postcolonialism and East-­Central Eu­ro­pean hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 Lit­er­a­tures” in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2014 and for including my article 7 in their collection Postcolonial Eu­rope? Essays on Post-­Communist Lit­er­a­tures 8 and Cultures (2015). Another impor­tant venue for developing my views on 9 the external imperial difference was an invited publication inIntersections: 10 East Eu­ro­pean Journal of Society and Politics in Budapest. I am very grateful 11 to its editor, Margit Feischmidt, for giving me this wonderful opportunity 12 for exploring my ideas in international contexts and for developing the 13 critique of the imperial difference. 14 I am grateful to my gender studies and Baltic studies colleagues from 15 two Swedish universities—­Linköping University and Södertorn University. 16 In the last several years the Center for Baltic and East Eu­ro­pean Studies 17 (cbees) at Södertorn University and the Gender Studies Unit at Linköping 18 University invited me several times as scholar-in-­ ­residence, visiting scholar, 19 and keynote speaker. This has also allowed me to present­ my ongoing in- 20 vestigations in preparation for this book. 21 I thank several museums, galleries, curators, and art theorists for their 22 generous invitations to participate in the educational and theoretical pro- 23 grams of several exhibitions, contemporar­ y art biennials, and other related 24 events, including Manifesta 10; the theoretical program of the Moscow 25 Center of Con­temporary Art; the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in 26 Moscow; the Moscow Biennale of Con­temporary Art; the Aspan Gallery in 27 Almaty, Kazakhstan; the Media Impact Festival; Viktor Misiano’s multiple 28 proj­ects on post-­socialist artists and imaginaries and, particularly, his in- 29 vitations to publish several texts in Moscow Art Magazine. This experience 30 was invaluable for working on this book. 31 I am also grateful to the two anonymous readers of the first draft of 32 this book. Their constructive and well-meaning­ suggestions and comments 33 helped improve the manuscript. 34 Last but not least, I thank artists, writers and activists for their im­ 35 mensely impor­tant reflections that they shared with me in our interviews 36 and personal dialogues. Among them, I am especially grateful to Vyacheslav 37 Akhunov, Aslan Gaisumov, Taus Makhacheva, Afanassy Mamedov, Anton 38 Nikolayev, Egor Rogalev, Liina Siib, and Saule Suleimenova.

viii acknowl­edgments

218-73357_ch00_1P.indd 8 1/16/18 5:24 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Ultimately, in the war between the refrigerator (rising food prices) and 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th the tele­vi­sion set (the war in Ukraine), the refrigerator is likely to win. 4 —The Economist, December 17, 2014 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 INTRODUCTION 12 13 14 15 A Futureless Ontology? 16 17 18 19 20 21 I was writing this introduction at a very complex and rapidly changing 22 global geopo­liti­cal moment when the very future­ existence of Russia­ as a 23 separate state was becoming problematic. I was writing from the relatively 24 safe position of chaired professor at a Swedish university, but I was and ­will 25 always remain a product of the Rus­sian and Soviet imperial legacies—­a 26 postcolonial other with ancestors originating in the Russian­ Orient and 27 the Rus­sian South—­the two darker colonial spaces that are seldom taken 28 into account in any imperial-­colonial discussions. Therefore, I am a person 29 from the darker side of the Russian/Soviet­ modernity/coloniality. In this 30 book I focus mainly on the experiences, sensibilities and creative work of 31 the postcolonial artists who happen to be at the same time postsoviet. Yet I 32 would like to start with a few preliminary remarks on the evolution of the 33 Rus­sian imperial difference that, in tandemwith the failed yet never buried 34 Soviet modernity proj­ect, has led to today’­ s stagnation, anomie, and loom- 35 ing disintegration. 36 37 38

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 1 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th The Imperial Difference Once Again 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 In several works coauthored with Walter Mignolo and in my own texts hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 I have touched upon the specific nature of external imperial difference and hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 Rus­sia as a graphic example of such a difference (Tlostanova 2007, 2014, hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 2015; Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012).1 To put it simply, starting from about 7 the sixteenth ­century a global imperial hierarchy appeared in the emerging 8 world system. Within this hierarchy several imperial leagues wer­ e formed 9 and transformed in the course of time. In the post-Enlightenment­ moder- 10 nity Spain, Italy, and Portugal moved to the position of the South of Europe­ 11 and hence to the internal imperial difference that never collapsed into ab- 12 solute or insurmountable forms. The Ottoman sultanate and Rus­sia, on the 13 contrary, became the zones of the external imperial difference, as they ­were 14 rooted in dif­fer­ent (from the core Eu­ro­pean norm) religions, languages, eco- 15 nomic models, and ethnic-­racial classifications. Both internal and external 16 imperial ­others ­were never allowed to join the first league and become 17 equal to ­Great Britain, France, or the United States ­today. 18 One might think that ­these markers ceased to be valid anymore. Yet in 19 real­ity they continue to flourish and affect the global geopoliti­ ­cal relations, 20 classifying ­people and defining the validity of their lives in line with the 21 original matrix of modernity and its rigid human­ taxonomies and hierar- 22 chies. A terrorist act in Paris is unconditionally regarded, and represented, 23 as a tragedy in both global mass media and social media, whereas the deaths 24 of thousands of civilians daily in the ­Middle East go practically unnoticed. 25 A quiet decay of Rus­sia as the largest remnant of the Soviet empire would 26 also remain completely uninteresting to the world which is indifferent to 27 the fate of several dozen million people­ who have all become hostages of 28 the inhumane regime. It is only the looming global nuclear threat and the 29 neo-­imperial geopo­liti­cal ambitions of the Rus­sian administration, which 30 is trying once again to break into the first league previously irremediably 31 losing in its imperial status, which still keep Rus­sia on the front pages. The 32 pragmatic security discourses then remain the only justification for the rest 33 of the world to continue paying attention to this faraway region pushed 34 more and more out of the world system, and reduced in its rank from the 35 semi-­periphery to an ultimately peripheral status. 36 What is at work ­here can be called a rule of regressive turning of imperial 37 difference into colonial one, when a second-rate­ empire, in the imaginar- 38 ies of the winning rivals, is regarded as a colony, soon starts to realize this

2 introduction

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 2 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 status, and react in aggressive and negativist ways. Thus the failed Soviet hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th modernity shifted into the colonial realm in relation to the winning neo- 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th liberal modernity/coloniality, yet retained some traces of its own, internal 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th imperial-­colonial structures and hierarchies, the most obvious of which is 4 the colonizing attitude to the non-­Western, postcolonial, post-­Soviet ­others. 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th But the very realization of this difference by the imperial ideologues al- 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th lowed them to use this argument in their favor­ . And the Russian­ imperial 7 revivalism acquired an opportunity to take the forms which externally re- 8 sembled anticolonial strug­gles, at times appropriating the decolonial argu- 9 ments, and trying on the role of the victim in global geopolitics. This is 10 what is now taking place in Rus­sia in its efforts to pretend to be a postco- 11 lonial subaltern and thus justify its revived imperial expansionism. But the 12 wolf’s fangs stick out of its sheep’s clothing. 13 The Rus­sian imperial difference triggers its specific schizo­phre­nia, 14 which is dif­fer­ent from the classical Duboisean double-­consciousness (Du 15 Bois 1903) in its clearly negative stance. The imperial double-­consciousness 16 in contrast with the colonial one is unable to mutate into anything con- 17 structive; it ­either has to go or it has to be radically transformed into a dif­ 18 fer­ent model. Rus­sia is choking on its own rejection and fury addressed to 19 both the stronger imperial rivals and the weaker colonial ­others. 20 Imperial difference in itself is evidence of the agonistic and rigidly hi- 21 erarchical nature of modernity/coloniality. At its core is an implied and 22 delocalized reference point that originally lay in the heart of Europe­ but 23 has now shifted ­toward the Anglo-­Saxon world, with its heart in the United 24 States. The rest of the ­people are taxonomized along the ­human scale of 25 modernity in relation to their proximity to this vantage point. Some are as- 26 signed a status of the forever catching-up agents or even voluntary define 27 it as their goal. ­Others are placed into the ghetto of absolute otherness 28 and are withdrawn from history and modernity. As for the post-Soviet,­ and 29 wider post-­socialist, condition, in the past twenty-five­ years it has demon- 30 strated the growing dispersal tendencies which remap the former Socialist 31 subjects and position them along dif­fer­ent vectors and within dif­fer­ent alli- 32 ances in the new world order where the precarious Socialist semi-­periphery 33 is rapidly sliding into a more and more chronic peripheral condition. 34 The post-­Soviet trajectory of Russia­ and a number of its former colo- 35 nies shows that they wer­ e first lured by the carrot of the catching-up mod- 36 ernization and even, in the case of the Euro­ ­pean semiperiphery, by the 37 promise of getting back to the Euro­ ­pean bosom, but ­these models ­were 38

introduction 3

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 3 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th grounded in false evolutionism. With dif­fer­ent speeds and to dif­fer­ent ex- 2 tents of realization of their failure most of ­these socie­ties grasped that they hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 would never be allowed or able to step from the darker side of modernity hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 to the lighter one, from otherness to sameness. The only move they could hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 count on is comprised of the small steps along the endless ladder of mo- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 dernity that ultimately led nowhere yet always enchanted with a desired 7 but unattainable horizon. A number of postsocialist communities started 8 cultivating ­bitter reactions of disappointment in the Euro­ ­pean, and wider 9 Western, proj­ect, and their critiques resembled, and even openly borrowed 10 from, postcolonial arguments (Lazarus 2012; Slapšak 2012). 11 The EastEu­ro­pean countries ­were interpreted within the global neolib- 12 eral modernity/coloniality in a progressivist rather than Orientalist manner: 13 they ­were considered to be reformable and eventually subject to Eu­ro­pean 14 assimilation, yet always with an indelible difference. The postsocialist­ people 15 ­were offered to accept, without question, the existing global hierarchy in 16 which every­one is assigned a precise, fixed and never questioned place, 17 and is afraid of losing that precarious position by being associated with 18 countries—­such as ­those of the global South—­that stand even lower. The 19 postsocialist countries’ almost unani­­mous refusal to accept refugees, a posi- 20 tion supported by both their governments and their populations and often 21 verbalized in exclusionary, racist forms, should be interpreted not only 22 through a ­simple economic rationale and the specific ym thol­ ­ogy of Eastern 23 Eu­rope acting as a sacrifice to inhuman communist egimes,r but also, and 24 more importantly, be interpreted as a trace of the modern/colonial rivalry 25 that, in the case of ­these “new” Eu­ro­pe­ans, is not alleviated by discourses 26 of welfare, charity, or solidarity. 27 28 Postcolonial Rhe­toric Borrowed by Post-­Socialist Countries 29 30 The appropriation of postcolonial and, at times, decolonial rhetoric­ in 31 relation to the postsocialist countries in the increasingly unipolar (in de- 32 spite all of the proclamations of multipolarity) world, has gone quite un- 33 evenly. In postsocialist Eastern Europe­ it was faster, more successful, and 34 less censored ­because the liberating rhetoric­ logically shifted from the old 35 dependence on Rus­sia and the USSR to a critique of the new dependence 36 on Western Eu­rope and the United States without touching the interests 37 of the new national elites. The discourse of postcolonialism was not only 38 harmless, therefore; but was even somewhat useful for the newly in­de­pen­

4 introduction

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 4 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 dent states. The postsocialist intellectuals started to write about the subal- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ternization and peripheralization of Eastern Europe­ and Central Eu­rope and 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th on the sensibility of Euro­ ­pean poor relatives who wer­ e forced from their 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th real socialism into the real neoliberal capitalism, with no hope for success 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th or, sometimes, even for mere survival (Kołodziejczyk and Sandru 2012; 5 ­Pucherová and Gáfric 2015). Postsocialist artists such as Ciprian Mureşan 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and Tanja Ostojić have addressed the metaphors­ and imagery that inter- 7 sect with postcolonial sensibilities, often through projecting these­ ­artistic 8 means onto the con­temporary global coloniality. 9 However, ­these sentiments did not lead to any wide-­scale state Socialist 10 re­nais­sance movements, or even to ­simple nostalgia for the bygone Social- 11 ist days. One of the reasons is that in the Socialist system, ­these socie­ 12 ties ­were already aware of their colonial status and humiliation due to the 13 Soviet occupation. Being oppressed and then nostalgic about an earlier, 14 albeit dif­fer­ent form of, oppression would indeed be strange. The schism 15 in relation to the West and efforts to merge with it in any function once 16 again followed old, imperial borders. An in­ter­est­ing example is Ukraine, 17 which was divided in its politi­ ­cal preferences not only in accordance with 18 the Rus­sian population distribution during the Soviet years, but also along 19 the olderAustro-­Hungarian borders with Russia.­ The Baltic countries pro- 20 vide another complex example: although they are unhappy about the harsh 21 economic prob­lems they now face and about the mass-migration­ of their 22 populations to Western Eu­rope, they are reluctant to revise their attitude 23 that the Soviet occupation caused all of the prob­lems. The Baltic littoral 24 continues to see Germany and the Scandinavian countries as an El Dorado 25 for the Baltic postsocialist migrants­ , even if their motherlands histori- 26 cally have had quite a painful and complex predicament of internal Euro­ ­ 27 pean colonization initiated by ­these same Western Eu­ro­pean role models 28 (Kalnačs 2016a). 29 The situation of the non-European­ post-­Soviet former colonies—in 30 Central Asia and in the southern Caucasus (with the significant exception 31 of Georgia)—is much dif­fer­ent. ­Here the postcolonial and decolonial dis- 32 courses of any politi­ ­cal kind are tabooed, because­ the symbolic power and 33 influence of the failed Soviet empire remained quite significantthere ­ ­until 34 very recently. Therefore, any critique of Rus­sian and Soviet expansionism 35 is banned. In many cases it has also continued until­ now. Sympathies have 36 often stayed on the Rus­sian side and lingered in the mutual past, even 37 if this past was highly mythologized and in­ven­ted. In many cases this was 38

introduction 5

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 5 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th a tactical position more than a sincere belief. And only the latest serious 2 economic crises, international isolation, and the terminal decline of the hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 Janus-­faced empire (Tlostanova 2003),2 which is now hastily swapping its hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 masks, shifted the situation in a drastic way. As a result, the Central Asian hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 and Caucasus states and regions, some of which are still formally part of hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 the Rus­sian Federation, started looking for other partners and co­ali­tions, 7 including ­those in the ­Middle and Far East—­the partners, which before 8 used to be kept in reserve as the association with the old Rus­sian and Soviet 9 metropolis was simpler and, possibly, safer. 10 In the non-European­ post-­Soviet former colonies and in the Russian­ 11 Federation itself, art seems to be among the very few remaining ways to 12 reflect critically on the intersection of the decolonial and de-Sovietizing­ 13 impulses. No postcolonial or much less decolonial revisionist models have 14 been allowed to go into circulation, and in the context of the Russian­ Fed- 15 eration’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, theorists, politicians, and activists 16 have been cut off romf the use of any such potentially dissident tools. In 17 the latest Rus­sian reactionary wave, the old familiar logic is reproduced: as 18 in the time of Leo Tolstoy, art, once again, fulfills the function of the miss- 19 ing, strangled, or co-­opted critical social theory, philosophy, and po­liti­cal 20 activism. The list of artists performing the impor­tant tasks of critical reflec- 21 tion includes, among others,­ Evgeny Antufiev, Aslan Gaisumov, Vladimir 22 Dubossarsky, Shifra Kazhdan, Sergey and Tatyana Kostrikov, Taus Makh- 23 acheva, Anton Nikolayev, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Pyotr Pavlensky, Timofey 24 Radya, Egor Rogalev, Anna Titova, and Alexander Vinogradov. 25 The most doomed situation is in Rus­sia itself, which has suffered ­under 26 the imperial difference syndrome for several centuries (certainly long be- 27 fore it attempted to build state Socialism). Rus­sia strove to fit into the logic 28 of catching up and tried to build a separate Socialist modernity, with its 29 own coloniality sharing the main premises of modernity at large, such 30 as racism, Orientalism, progressivism, the rhe­toric of salvation, a fixation 31 on newness, asymmetrical divisions of ­labor—­that is, generally the colo- 32 niality of being, gender, knowledge, and sensibility. The Rus­sian empire 33 was dominated culturally, technologically, intellectually, and in other ways 34 by the core Eu­ro­pean countries, yet it subsumed other peripheral spaces, 35 making it a clear case of semiperipherality. 36 The lighter side of Soviet modernity was grounded in ideological and 37 social differences that wer­ e used to build human­ hierarchies. Its darker 38 colonial side mostly reiterated the nineteenth ­century racist clichés and

6 introduction

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 6 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 ­human taxonomies mixed with hastily adapted historical materialist dog- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th mas. Today’s­ Rus­sia is still nonhomogeneous, and the restarting of its “parade 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th of sovereignties” is threatening to dismantle the country forever. Seces- 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th sionism inside the Russian­ Federation is not only ethnic, cultural, and re- 4 ligious but also clearly economic, as it is linked with an uneven regional 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th re­distribution of resources, with the pillage of the provinces in ­favor of 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Moscow, with the articulation and development of often militant regional 7 identities and ultimately, with their urge to become in­de­pen­dent. The lat- 8 ter tendency can be witnessed in the cases of Altay, Tatarstan, the Volga 9 region, and Yakutia, as well as parts of Siberia, and has already become the 10 focus of attention of several con­temporary art activists. 11 The concept of internal colonization, which has become popu­lar thanks 12 to Alexander Etkind’s book Internal Colonization: Rus­sia’s Imperial Experience 13 (2011), is now acquiring a dif­fer­ent and less historically and contextually 14 bound meaning, which Etkind himself may have not intended. He com- 15 pared Russian­ serfs to African American slaves and Amerindians, pointing 16 out the lack of racial difference between masters and serfs in the case of 17 Rus­sia and claiming that the category of “estate” acted as a substitute for 18 race. Rather the ­whole Rus­sian model can be viewed as a case of zoological 19 coloniality, following the nineteenth-­century Siberian dissident Afanasy 20 Shchapov (1906), to whom Etkind devoted one of the best chapters of his 21 book. Shchapov meant a parallel annihilation of fur-­providing animals and 22 the indigenous ­people who ­were forced to hunt ­those animals, ­under pain 23 of death, during the early colonization of Siberia. Toda­ y this model of de- 24 humanizing and equating human­ lives with mere instruments of thought- 25 less natural­ resource extraction covers the entire population of the Rus­sian 26 Federation, regardless of our ethnic/racial, class, and religious belonging. 27 Once again, the Janus-faced­ empire is trapped between its two masks: 28 the servile visage that, following Frantz Fanon’s logic (1967), could be iden- 29 tified as Rus­sian ­faces and Western masks; and a patronizing mask meant 30 for Rus­sia’s own, non-­European eastern and southern colonies and former 31 colonies. ­Today this configuration is complicated and changed in a new 32 geopo­liti­cal situation in which the lives of ordinary citizens of all religions 33 and ethnicities are seen as dispensable. At the present­ moment when a 34 handful of Russian­ state oligarchs have already completely pillaged the 35 remnants of the Soviet economy (which was not the most efficient but still 36 was created by the collective efforts of the Sovietpeople, ­ not by a handful 37 of properly connected tycoons) and pumped the profit into their foreign bank 38

introduction 7

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 7 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th accounts, and when oil and gas production stopped to be sufficiently gainful, 2 they turned to looting the deprived population as the only remaining source hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 of easy profit and to physical elimination of both the weak and the dissatisfied. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 I Come from Nowhere, or Back to the Same Sensibility ­after hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 Twenty-­Five Years 7 8 ­Today, dwelling in a quiet Swedish town I am often reflecting on the fact 9 that more than half of my life took place in the post-­Soviet waiting and 10 survival room from which ­there is obviously no way out and that has slowly 11 turned into a place to wait for the other world beyond life and death. This is 12 prob­ably the main ­human existential result of twenty-­five post-­Soviet years. 13 I indicate them with two very personal milestones which nevertheless are 14 directly connected with the gist of the post-­Soviet ­human condition. 15 In the year of the Soviet Union’s quiet collapse I was an exchange stu- 16 dent in the United States. After­ my study abroad program I was going­ back 17 home and I realized that I had a passport from a nonex­ ­is­tent state: the 18 USSR. Certainly I was allowed to leave the United States,—albeit­ with an 19 ironic smile—and­ let into the newly established Russian­ Federation with 20 a habitual gloomy suspicion. Moreover, Soviet foreign passports remained 21 valid for almost ten years ­after the collapse ­because ­there ­were simply too 22 many passport blanks previously produced with a typical Soviet imperial 23 grandeur and planning economy zeal. They had to be used in spite of the 24 fact that no such country existed any more. But while I was standing in the 25 passport control line at the poorly lit and dirty Sheremetyevo International 26 Airport—­which was only starting to be filled with exiles and refugees, 27 the bits and pieces of empire striving to break ­free from its still tenacious 28 hands—­I suddenly felt that for us, the holders of such passports, the very 29 passage of time had changed. The sea of time almost palpably went around 30 us and left us ­behind, discarded in some cases as if we wer­ e fish suffocating 31 on a dry, sandy shore. Twenty-five­ years have passed, and today­ the same 32 sense of disintegration is clearly in the air once again. And I have no idea 33 what ­will await me if I decide use my now Rus­sian passport sometime in 34 the near ­future to visit my place of birth. Could recent history repeat itself 35 so soon, especially since we have never learned its lessons? 36 The past twenty-five­ post-­Soviet years have been marked by a strange re- 37 verse logic for former inhabitants of the USSR, a logic that falls outside the 38

8 introduction

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 8 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 usual modern progressivism, typical for the relations of the global North hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and South. We woke up one day to find ourselves in a new condition that 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th was chosen for us by someone else.­ It was a condition of a dinosaur that 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th somehow did not die in due time and had to languish in the back yards of 4 history, which at that point indeed seemed to have reached its climax and 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th come to a standstill in the eternal consumerist paradise. Yet even ­those So- 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th viet ­people who honestly believed in their opportunity to change and join 7 the world, and who hastily started working towar­ d this condition, soon 8 realized that the road from our own history into the real world was quite 9 long and hard, and maybe it was even a dead-­end. 10 We woke up to a new reality­ of multiple dependencies and increased 11 unfreedoms in which the previous Soviet unfreedom was not at all lifted, 12 but, on the contrary soon acquired new forms that combined economic 13 exploitation with the lack of rights and renewed ideological control. That 14 is, although the external forms changed, conditions remained the same in 15 their repressive essence. In fact, it was a story of the suddenly cancelled 16 Socialist modernity that left its voluntary and involuntary participants and 17 agents in ruin and unable to rejoin history. According to one respondent in 18 Second­hand Time (2013, 91), by the Nobel Prize–­winning author Svetlana 19 Alexievich, “Socialism has ended, but we are still ­here.” The post-­Soviet 20 ­people became equivalents of a losing race and bound to dis­appear or 21 merge with the global South. 22 The Soviet immigrant Boris Groys, now a social and art theorist in Ger- 23 many, stresses the paradoxical direction of the path taken by most post-­ 24 socialist countries: “The post-­Communist subject travels the same route as 25 described by the dominating discourse of cultural studies—­but he or she 26 travels this route in the opposite direction, not from the past to the future­ , 27 but from the future­ to the past; from the end of history . . . ​back to histori- 28 cal time. Post-­Communist life is life lived backward, a movement against 29 the flow of time” (Groys 2008, 155). Groys thinks that the state Socialist 30 modernity in a sense was a leap against the course of the world history, 31 an attempt to transcend it. The more difficult and crashing it became for 32 us to be ­later sent back to the usual course, speed and direction of history 33 and to change the radical Socialist progressivist model to a milder version 34 of the forever unattainable Western ideal; why we continue to plod slowly 35 and endlessly along instead of leaving the drudgery behind­ and leaping 36 into the new and wonderful future­ in one jump. This shift was interpreted 37 38

introduction 9

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 9 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th by many ­people as a way backward, and used by the neo-imperial­ ideo- 2 logues as a justification of their revanchist appetites. In purely religious hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 or secular Soviet forms, the Rus­sian empire had always aimed at taking a hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 revenge for the losing ­battle with the West and ultimately erasing the impe- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 rial difference. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 The state of being expelled from history reiterated the general logic of 7 modernity, with its habitual operation of translating geography into chro- 8 nology (Mignolo 2000) and assigning ­whole groups of ­people living in 9 the non-­Western spaces to other times or, rather, positioning them outside 10 the only sanctioned course of time and the only appropriate way of life. Yet 11 in the post-­Soviet case, it was not the downtrodden premodern “savages” 12 on whom the Western modernity could practice its civilizing discourses. 13 Rather, it was an other state Socialist modernity which failed and was sub- 14 sequently rendered nonviable, while its voluntary and involuntary practi­ ­ 15 tion­ers had to be instructed on how to become fully modern (in the only 16 remaining neoliberal way) and, ultimately, fully human.­ The progressivist 17 paradigm has had an inbuilt feature of always keeping a sufficient lag be- 18 tween the modernizing catching-up ex-Socialist­ s and the first rate Western/ 19 Northern subjects. 20 Soon it became clear that post-Soviet­ ­people seemingly sent to the end of 21 the queue, in fact, ­were simply squeezed out of history, because­ the catch- 22 ing-up would never end in overtaking. We found ourselves in the void, in 23 a problematic locale inhabited by problem­ ­people. And it was this situation 24 of having nothing to lose that shaped­ ­today’s dangerous postimperial res- 25 sentiment. Yet in speaking about a generalized postsocialist person, Groys 26 neglects the colonial difference inside the external imperial difference—­ 27 the darker side of (post-)Soviet modernity marked by Orientalism, racism, 28 othering, and forced assimilation—and­ indirectly denies the fact that Soviet 29 progressivism meant one ­thing for Rus­sians and something ­else for Uzbeks 30 and Georgians. Thus, their pres­ent trajectories cannot be parallel or identi- 31 cal by definition. 32 As stated earlier, the hidden Rus­sian inferiority complexes typical of 33 external imperial difference have led from time to time to lapses into impe- 34 rial jingoism and revanchism that have now reached an extreme manifesta- 35 tion in which a new politi­ ­cal identity is being made out of stigmatization. 36 In other words, Rus­sia is effectively saying, “If the West calls me barbarous, 37 I ­will behave so.” In the past several years, this sentiment has been accentu- 38

10 introduction

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 10 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF fig. intro.1 Egor 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Rogalev, Situation 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th No. 2. Odessa, 2011. 3 Archival photo- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 graphic print in hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th vari­ous editions; 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th dimensions varia- 6 ble. From the photo 7 series Synchronic- 8 ity. Courtesy of the 9 artist. 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 ated and cultivated more and more frequently in the official Russian­ dis- 24 courses, stressing that Rus­sia is not Eu­rope, and elevating the previously 25 marginal neo-­Eurasianism to an almost official state ideology. 26 27 28 The Rus­sian Wolf in Postcolonial Sheep’s Clothing 29 In its pres­ent hysterically aggressive stage, Rus­sia is trying to jump out of the 30 catching-up model, in which it has existed at least since the seventeenth-­ 31 century reign of Peter the Great,­ and trying to make the world stop viewing 32 the imperial difference as a colonial difference, thus turning itself once 33 again into a respectable partner for the global North. This very impulse 34 is quite deceiving as it does not try to question the logic of modernity/ 35 coloniality as such, but merely alters Rus­sia’s position in it. This ­humble 36 goal is ­camouflaged as anticolonial pathos and a critique of the West, 37 38

introduction 11

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 11 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th which is skillfully used by the Russian­ administration to brainwash a popu- 2 lation that is already distracted by serious economic and social problems­ hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 and marked by “defuturing” tendencies (Fry 2011, 21). This imperial ap- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 propriation of postcolonial rhetoric­ also targets the Western left, who reflect hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 on the Rus­sian situation from safe positions and often praise President Vladi- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 mir Putin’s escapades for their anti-­Americanism. However, that position re- 7 mains blind to the fate of ­those at whose expense the dangerous neo-imperial­ 8 attacks are made. It erases politi­ ­cal and economic repression, increased pov- 9 erty, completely destroyed social state, and the looming extinction of a huge 10 country that has become a hostage to its insane and reckless regime. 11 It is not pos­si­ble to separate the Rus­sian face from its underside. And the 12 same way as modernity is not pos­si­ble without its darker colonial side, 13 the second-­rate imperial démarches and efforts to carve a safer space in 14 the modern/colonial system are impossible without infringing on ­human 15 rights and looting their own populations, the would-be citizens who are ob- 16 jectified, once again, as the instruments of the zoological economy. As a trade 17 commodity, fur was simply replaced for a while by oil; now it is the turn of the 18 population itself to be sacrificed and skinned by the state.After­ the last bits of 19 property are taken away from the animalized subjects of the collapsing regime, 20 the depopulated territory most likely ­will cease to be in­ter­est­ing to anybody—­ 21 most of all, to its own power elites. Therefore, the ugly and scary mask of the 22 imperial Janus, which once was turned in the direction of the non-­European 23 colonies, ­today is turned ­toward ­every citizen, ­whether they are applauding the 24 neo-­imperial rhe­toric or prefer their refrigerators to tele­vi­sion sets. 25 The Rus­sian imperial difference, characterized by the empire’s status 26 on the second tier and the constant presence of stronger Western rivals, 27 has generated multiple colonial differences among its colonized subjects, 28 which might actually find colonization by a first-rate­ empire more attrac- 29 tive.3 It is impor­tant to understand how this configuration is evolving in 30 the world in relation to other, more global processes;­ how the post-­Soviet 31 ­people revolt against an obvious injustice of the modern power asymmetry 32 but often do so in dangerous rightist, revanchist forms that are carefully 33 planted by state ideologues to later­ make food for powder out of its own 34 citizens in neoimperial military operations such as the infamous denied war 35 with Ukraine.4 Those­ who disagree also find themselves in a paradoxical situ- 36 ation both inside and outside the country: while abroad, we are often still 37 held responsible for the sins of Putin’s regime, while at home we are branded 38 as a “fifth column” and persecuted as traitors and foreign agents.

12 introduction

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 12 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 ­Today the Rus­sia Federation’s state ideologues are desperately feeding the hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th impoverished population with an unappetizing soup of discourses drawn 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th from imperial narratives that are quite dif­fer­ent both contextually and tem- 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th porally. They range from almost theocratic statist models of sacred geogra- 4 phy superseding geopolitics, grounded in the sanctification of the state and 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th the ruler and aggressive territorial expansionism masked by various­ spiri- 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th tual justifications, to revivalism of the Socialist and, particularly, Stalin- 7 ist “grandeur,” which attempts to glue disjointed and emaciated people­ 8 spread over a gigantic and unmanageable territory together via memories 9 of military valor and sports and space-­exploration accomplishments of the 10 Soviet époque. But efforts to reanimate national and imperial mythologi- 11 cal consciousness have not been particularly successful. Their main axis—­ 12 the in­ven­ted interconnection between Rus­sia’s territorial vastness and its 13 ­grandeur—is increasingly shattered by growing secessionist sensibilities and 14 the development of regional identities and imaginaries in various­ parts of 15 the country. They feel themselves as the new old colonies of Moscow, and 16 more and more actively discuss dif­fer­ent possibilities of separation and sur- 17 vival on their own or with the help of dif­fer­ent partners—­from Western 18 ­Eu­rope to China and Iran. One more imperial card that is now being played, 19 is the Rus­sian language as a unifying force. Appeals to a linguistic unity of 20 the “Rus­sian world” are pres­ent in vari­ous neo-­imperial agendas—­right, left 21 and centrist—­from Alexander Dugin to pres­ent day National Bolsheviks. 22 Another recurrent element­ of Russian­ imperial mythol­ ­ogy is the false 23 narrative of Rus­sia as a savior of suffering nations. This myth is still suc- 24 cessfully employed in imperial propaganda for both Russians­ and a number 25 of presumably liberated ­people, such as ­those in several countries of the 26 former Yugo­slavia and in Bulgaria, who juxtapose the ­imagined Orthodox 27 Slavic community with a demonized Ottoman yoke. Russia’­ s annexation of 28 Crimea in 2014 and the tragic and shameful events that followed in Ukraine 29 and Syria (and the preceding neoimperial war in Georgia) wer­ e grounded 30 in similar false arguments of defending the Russians­ or their brother­ na- 31 tions living in someone ­else’s territory or destroying civilians ­under the 32 pretext of fighting terrorism. At first, many post-Soviet­ ­people took this 33 rationale at face value, having fished out of their unconscious the all too 34 familiar conservative and revanchist servility and a sickening allegiance 35 to ­those in power, which still lie very close to the surface. Yet ­today’s So- 36 viet re­nais­sance is another simulacrum, an empty shell with no meaning, a 37 playful revival of Stalinist Russia,­ where mortal fear and deadly conviction 38

introduction 13

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 13 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th are normalized once again, but go hand in hand with cynical corruption, 2 demagogic invectives, and typical arguments of timeservers living out of hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 their suitcases. Artists ­were the first to detect and critically address this hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 falseness, such as the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan, the Rus­sian writer hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 Vladimir Sorokin, the directors Kirill Serebrennikov and Andrey Zvyagint- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 sev, the Georgian novelist Zaza Burchuladze, and the Crimean film direc- 7 tor and activist Oleg Sentsov, and ­others. 8 9 The Black Legend, Russian/Soviet-Style­ 10 11 In our effort to understand the evolution of the external imperial difference 12 ­today, we should take into account that at ­every stage of its evolution it has 13 been marked by the logic of the Leyenda Negra (black legend),5 which was 14 well tested in the rivalry between the British and Spanish empires. “Black 15 legendism” also flourishes in Rus­sia ­today, and no one has yet attempted to 16 problematize it. The Janus-­faced empire represents itself as good, spiritual, 17 kind, and fair, in opposition to its Western and non-­Western rivals. This is 18 expressed in Rus­sia’s habitual stigmatization of the double standards of the 19 West. Yet ­these accusations themselves are grounded in morally dubious 20 and logically flawed assumptions that exempt Rus­sia from the zone of re- 21 sponsibility for its own actions—­that is, if the West does not comply with its 22 own laws and rules and if it violates human­ rights, why should Rus­sia bother 23 to comply with international law? However, on the global scale, it does not 24 ­matter who violates ­human rights—­European countries, the United States, 25 or Rus­sia, who could trigger a global disaster. What does matter­ is how we 26 can learn to live together in this world without infringing on other people’­ s 27 rights and then justifying it by pointing our accusing fingers­ at ­others. 28 Strangely enough, the logic of self-justification­ by accusing ­others is 29 supported by many leftist intellectuals who do not seem to be aware of the 30 fact that discarding the legitimacy of international law—­however imper- 31 fect it is as such or how irregularly it is implemented—­could easily lead 32 us to destruction and violence­ for their own sake or as an intimidation 33 tool. But does it ­really make sense to blackmail the international commu- 34 nity with constant military threats? If so, we ­will soon have a Hobbesian 35 society of war of all against all. Or maybe we already live in that society. 36 Would it not be better to abstain from claiming that every­one is equal in 37 violating the laws and instead act maturely by trying to formulate laws, and 38 global mechanisms for their implementation, that would not infringe on

14 introduction

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 14 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 anyone’s rights? We have to find a global way of negotiating our common hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ­future on this planet in order to have any ­future at all. And the global co- 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th loniality needs to be globally dismantled instead of trying to carve a better 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th space in its perverse hierarchy or paying it back with equal vio­lence and 4 lawlessness. 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Alas, the external imperial difference continues to reproduce the black 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th legend logic at all stages of its evolution. Thus, Russia­ applies a technique 7 of looking for Western faults while ignoring or shadowing its own defi- 8 ciencies. This has occurred throughout history and could take construc- 9 tive forms of borrowing and improving the Western accomplishments. As 10 the semiotician Yuri Lotman has demonstrated, with the Byzantine Empire 11 acting as an equivalent of the West, Rus­sian thinkers claimed a better 12 understanding and implementation of Greek doctrine than the original 13 Orthodox Christian Church. Later,­ Rus­sian interpreters of the French en- 14 lightenment once again claimed they better understood the main princi­ 15 ples than the French. The Bolsheviks also borrowed their main tenets from 16 Western socialist and communist doctrines and then altered them to suit 17 their purposes and presented this alteration as an improvement (Lotman 18 2002, 273). 19 The false my­thol­ogy of the Rus­sian/Soviet imperial liberating mission 20 has also acquired the form of a “black legend” and was grounded in the 21 opposition of Rus­sia, presumably helping other nations break ­free of evil 22 and mercenary Western empires, which wer­ e oppressing poor people­ in 23 India, Africa, and the Amer­i­cas. The Rus­sian religious phi­los­o­pher Vladi- 24 mir Solovyev pointed this out in 1888 by drawing attention to the double 25 standards of the Janus-­faced empire: 26 27 We wanted to liberate Serbia and Bulgaria, but at the same time 28 we continued to oppress Poland. This system of oppression is bad 29 in itself, but it becomes much worse due to the crying discrepancy 30 with liberating ideals and disinterested help that Russian­ politics has 31 always claimed to be its style and its exclusive right. ­These politics 32 are necessarily drenched in lying and hy­poc­risy that take away any 33 prestige. . . . One​ cannot—­with perfect impunity—write­ on his ban- 34 ner the freedom of all Slavs and other ­people while simul­ ­ta­neously 35 taking national freedom away from the Poles; religious freedom away 36 from the Uniats and Russian­ religious dissenters; [and] civil rights 37 away from the Jews. (Solovyev 2002, 247–48). 38

introduction 15

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 15 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ­These words are still true today­ . In accordance with this double standard, 2 Rus­sia continues to “liberate” nations in order to colonize them or make hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 them useful in establishing or reconfirming its geopo­liti­cal dominance. The hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 lack of any collective repentance or massive intellectual de-­imperialization hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 are contributing to Rus­sia’s defeat ­today. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 The Perishable Soviet Re­nais­sance Minus the ­Future 8 9 The fact that we cannot bury the past and start living in the pres­ent is 10 linked not only to our acquiescence to being made into victims once again 11 but also to our inability and unwillingness to think critically and finally­ 12 shelve Soviet modernity/coloniality in an archive or museum. Easily re- 13 vived inferiority complexes, together with memories of imperial grandeur 14 and the deification of power in its personalized forms that equate the ruler, 15 the state, and the country, are immediately channeled by imperial ideo- 16 logues and their mass-media­ henchmen to prolong the agony of the regime 17 and prevent the collapse of the falling empire for a ­little longer. 18 The reanimation of the Soviet modernity proj­ect—­which in essence, if not 19 in its form continued the aggressive messianism of Russian­ ­Orthodoxy—is 20 being used to extend the fragile status quo. And the belt-tightening­ rhe­toric 21 with universal justice as its fake goal seems to switch on in the collective 22 unconscious memories of earlier liberating discourses: from the biblical 23 “the last shall­ be first” to L’Internationale’s “We are nothing; let us be all.” 24 But an impor­tant difference, or even a deliberate deception, is at work 25 ­here: no one ­today is promising happiness even in the distant ­future, to say 26 nothing of the possibility of any future­ per se. If the Soviet discourse used 27 to pres­ent the ideal ­future as an open and unrestrained utopia, at least ­until 28 the mid1960s when it became obvious that communism would not come 29 any time soon and the Soviet ideology shifted ­toward the past. 30 Yet at the core of state Socialist utopianism for a long time stood the 31 idea of universal happiness and consequently the happy future­ . It is true 32 that way too soon utopia became sealed and exclusionary. But the social 33 contract of the Soviet ­people was in many ways linked to this ­imagined 34 ­future happiness that they ­were offered to exchange for the hardships and 35 difficulties of their pres­ent. ­Today the belt-­tightening rhe­toric is not com- 36 pensated any more by any promise of the universal happiness in near or 37 distant ­future. What we are offered instead is merely a symbolic compensa- 38 tion in the form of phantasmal superiority. The worn out victory-in-­ ­defeat

16 introduction

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 16 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 discourse and the inevitable post-apocalyptic­ triumph, in the Rus­sian case hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th are transferred entirely to the spiritual realm or even to hereafter. ­Those 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th who do not believe in the other world ruin themselves by drink or leave this 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th forcefully galvanized dead world for good6. It is not surprising therefore 4 that the lion’s share of artists, writers and film directors in contemporar­ y 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Rus­sia work with dystopian genres. 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th The favorite cliché of Rus­sian media borrowed from one of President 7 Putin’s speeches, likens the country to a slave who after­ twenty-­five years is 8 fi­nally getting up from his knees. Yet few options are being left open for the 9 slave who has been deceived into believing that economic stagnation and 10 lack of prospects for the ­future mean liberation from the West. It is ­really 11 a choice between the slow and miserable vegetation and survival in the 12 shrinking and stagnant economy, and the all-­too-­familiar Rus­sian “mean- 13 ingless and merciless revolt” (Pushkin 1960, 387), which would be immedi- 14 ately suppressed by the masters. Therefore, the shelf life of false liberation 15 discourses such as the Kremlin’s current imitation of ideology is quite short. 16 ­Those who used to be nothing at all times—­before the 1917 Revolution, 17 in the USSR, ­under Yeltsin and Putin—­are more and more aware of the 18 deception of the false exchange imposed on them by those­ in power. But 19 what can they ­really do, and how can they really­ influence the po­liti­cal, so- 20 cial, or any other sphere of life in Russia­ ­today? This ­bitter awareness of the 21 impossibility to change anything is perhaps the most hopeless feature of 22 con­temporary Rus­sian social and po­liti­cal real­ity. However, even the sim- 23 plest consumerist and previously pro-status­ quo minds have started to dem- 24 onstrate signs of doubt. Those­ who ­were ready to exchange their rights and 25 freedoms for a relative economic well-­being and the infamous deadening sta- 26 bility, which was replaced far too quickly with state-­of-­emergency rhe­toric, 27 are not happy anymore, and this emerging new real­ity cannot be ignored. 28 When I was writing the first draft of this introduction, one of the central 29 Moscow streets—­Tverskaya—­was blocked by protesters. They wer­ e not 30 hungry medical doctors or teachers, starving retirees or miners as it hap- 31 pened in the 1990s. They wer­ e relatively well-­off middle-­class ­people who 32 took bank loans in hard currency because­ the interest rate was lower than 33 the ruble mortgage. With the rapid devaluation of the ruble, in which their 34 salaries are paid, they have lost everything.­ One can accuse them of greed 35 and say that this is their own prob­lem. However, it is revealing that ­these 36 middle-­class victims of devaluation understand the direct relationship be- 37 tween the state’s predatory politics and their own personal prob­lem with the 38

introduction 17

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 17 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th banks. A video shown often on social media networks features a desperate 2 ­woman wearing a mink coat yelling from a picket line across Tverskaya, hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 which leads to the Kremlin, “Maybe we should give Crimea back—do we hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 ­really need it?” Crimea is indeed needed only symbolically, and the destiny hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 of the Crimean people­ once again demonstrates Russia’­ s typical treatment hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 of ­human beings as expendable material.7 It is more impor­tant to destroy 7 the ­enemy than to save the hostages, civilians or soldiers. The lacking 8 rights paradigm and dispensability of ­human lives have remained the main 9 features of the Rus­sian imperial difference. 10 To describe the nature of nationalism, Benedict Anderson (1983, 86) ap- 11 plied the meta­phor of the narrow skin of the nation-­state that is too small 12 to cover the body of the old empire. In the case of the Rus­sian/Soviet em- 13 pire, this meta­phor was further twisted as in the end the old skin was re- 14 moved and the new one never appeared. Or rather, a number of the pieces 15 of the old empire attempted to reuse fragments of the old (Soviet) skin by 16 renovating it with ersatz ethnic-national­ ornaments but, in fact, keeping 17 the old Marxist stagist paradigm intact. (A good example is Uzbekistan, 18 whose recently deceased President Islam Karimov managed to preserve 19 a hybrid Soviet-­feudal regime for almost three de­cades.) Rus­sia itself has 20 long been in a vulnerable and unstable position, unable to weave itself new 21 clothes or recycle its old ones. Soon it became clear that the bombastic in- 22 novation initiatives always clash again the persis­ ­tent Soviet-­Russian rigid 23 structures and post-­Soviet cynical corruption, leading to nothing. ­Today 24 the half-­collapsed empire is being hastily covered with this worn out cloth 25 marked by a serious cognitive dissonance of harsh neoliberal logic, dusted 26 with fundamentalist nationalist and imperial rhe­toric which is worded in a 27 distinctly populist way (Matveyev 2016). 28 ­There is no teleology and no point of arrival anymore. And no one is 29 ready to suffer in this world or in their lifetime for the sake of some abstract 30 utopian happiness of the ­future generations or even of some otherworldly 31 bliss. The resource of waiting for the wonderful future­ in the conditions 32 of pres­ent deprivation and humiliation is completely exhausted. History 33 did not end ­after all; it bypassed us. The vastness of space almost always 34 prevailed over time in Rus­sian history (except during a few swooping and 35 mobilizing efforts to force history to jump); today­ , the preeminence of 36 wilderness that was never properly cultivated or tamed is coming forward 37 once again. As post-Soviet­ Rus­sia falls out of modernity, in its Western and 38 Soviet versions, it is coming to a standstill.

18 introduction

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 18 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 Although the post-Soviet­ socie­ties have lived in a state of crisis for the hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th past twenty-­five years, the present­ crisis is rapidly turning into a crisis of 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th legitimacy in which epistemic, existential, and cultural—­not just social, eco- 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th nomic, and political—­ele­ments come forward, reinforcing anomie, disso- 4 ciation, and extreme willy-nilly­ individualism among the inhabitants of the 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th collapsing empire. This is a peculiar form of individualism that is grounded 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th not in ­human or civic dignity or responsibility but in sheer physical survival 7 of the poor and deprived as they come face to face with the hostile world 8 and repressive state-­oligarchic capitalism. In spite of all propagandistic 9 clichés and false myths imposed from the inside and outside, ­today’s post-­ 10 Soviet everyman is not the proverbial Socialist collectivist or a proponent 11 of the Rus­sian sobornost as a utopian “communal” ideal, opposed to liberal 12 “commonwealth” and Marxist “commons.” These­ confused people,­ who 13 just a few months ago proudly wore their patriotic Saint George’s ribbons 14 and ­were capable of uniting only against someone but not for anything, 15 suddenly are ready to fight collectively for economic and social well-­being 16 and demand that the power they have always supported finally­ fulfill its 17 part of the social contract. 18 The inflated paroxysms of patriotism by the­ dying Rus­sian state are in fact 19 efforts to fill a vacuum of beliefs with empty semantics and artificially unite 20 the dissociated masses ­under the banner of some fragile collective identity, 21 even though they share ­little more than growing repression, common terri- 22 tory, and language. Such enforced reunifications are tactical and essentially 23 short term, which the imperial ideologues realize better than anyone ­else. 24 The infusion of neoimperial ideology and policies are needed only until­ ­those 25 in power can finish their marauding proj­ects and escape, leaving the nonvi- 26 able homo post-­soveticus to perish and make room for other communities. 27 In Second­hand Time, Alexievich attempts to understand what consti- 28 tutes our post-­Soviet existential condition. In interview after­ interview, she 29 reveals recycled, second­hand beliefs and experiences that do not help to 30 build anything new in the ruins. ­Today Alexievich’s meta­phor ­will acquire 31 even more sinister overtones ­because the second­hand time of the Socialist 32 modernity is being miraculously resurrected in the most sickening ele­ments 33 of the au­then­tic Soviet real­ity. Yet it is a repetition with a difference: in the 34 original Soviet world, everything­ was deadly serious, including the ­peoples’ 35 genuine, and hence more power­ful and terrifying, feelings and beliefs. 36 Soviet ­people went easily to their doom for the ­grand ideals, however 37 false. ­Today’s Rus­sian citizens, by contrast, are offered only a bad theatrical 38

introduction 19

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 19 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 fig. intro.2 Egor Rogalev, Situation No. 29. Moscow, 2011. Archival photographic 19 print in vari­ous editions; dimensions variable. From the photo series Synchronicity. 20 Courtesy of the artist. 21 22 23 performance—­a cocktail of Stalinism and fascism with strong Orthodox 24 Christian and fundamentalist nationalist ferment. 25 The Soviet utopia always retained a power­ful ele­ment of messianism 26 and the utopian teleology of building a new and wonderful world. Conse- 27 quently, future­ stood in the center of its ­grand narrative. It was a special 28 ­future equally happy for every­one and built to last forever, even if the Soviet 29 state wanted to make every­one happy by force without asking their opinion. 30 This hope supported the exhausted people­ for a while in the 1990s, allowing 31 to believe in the possibility of ­future changes and the necessity of enduring 32 hardship for the sake of the wonderful tomorrow. The revival of imperial 33 rhe­toric ­today cannot persuade anyone ­because it lacks an essential feeling 34 of stability, the confidence of coming and staying forever in which the Soviet 35 époque was grounded before. ­Today’s return of the Soviet rhe­toric is a case 36 of a “bad faith” from the start. It is a conscious self-­deceptive technique or, 37 in Lewis Gordon’s understanding, a rethinking of the Sartrean mauvaise-­foi: 38 “bad faith which is such ­because it in effect is an effort to perform aariety v of

20 introduction

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 20 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 contradictions the consequence of which requires lying to ourselves, making hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ourselves believe what we ­don’t believe, using our freedom to deny it, assert- 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ing the very ­human effort at ­human evasion” (Gordon 2000, 157). 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th The pres­ent appeals to tighten belts­ or die in the ser­vice of someone 4 ­else’s interests in the multiple wars in which Russia­ is engaging as it follows 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th its petty imperialist and short-­term tactical agendas and bullies the West 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th with fake criminal style hysteria are needed only to distract attention from 7 one more episode of money laundering or economic failure. ­These appeals, 8 however, almost never call for a wonderful ­future in any foreseeable time 9 or in this material world, much less for any egalitarian future­ as it was 10 the case in the USSR—at least on paper. The pres­ent administration real- 11 izes that no one would believe in such promises any more. The wonderful 12 ­future is cancelled, and by way of compensation we are offered to be happy 13 with the symbolic victory over the ­imagined enemies, and practice spiri- 14 tual and religious superiority and aggressive Messianic zeal, uncompen- 15 sated with anything in this material world. People­ deprived of any future­ , 16 do not cherish their lives and therefore are easily manipulated and become 17 potentially dangerous. Not surprisingly, many discourses popular­ in con­ 18 temporary Rus­sia revolve around eschatological premonitions with an ac- 19 cent on the dream of a new paradise with its center in Russia.­ In fact, this is 20 the logic of a fanatical sect whose victims and hostages in this case are the 21 ­whole population of a still large postimperial country which is sick with a 22 syndrome of the lacking ­future and missing hope. 23 We are not even sure if this ­future would ever come. But what is to be 24 done in such a situation, is something every­one decides for themselves. 25 Knowing that victory is impossible and our efforts to fight are doomed, 26 at least in the near ­future, makes some of us leave the country and ­others 27 reconcile and busy themselves with mere survival. But ­there are also ­those 28 who continue to speak up and act against, knowing that they ­will never 29 win yet also rejecting the continuation of the slavish existence. Even ­today 30 ­there are spheres in which decolonial thinkers are able to continue their 31 internal activism, which is destructive to the existing deadening system 32 and aimed at ­future existential resurgence—­and, eventually, the emer- 33 gence of a freer individual who can enter a dynamic correlational net- 34 work with other ­people and the nonhuman world. This is a meticulous 35 and step-­by-­step work on decolonizing people’­ s minds and bodies and of- 36 fering them dif­fer­ent options and vari­ous optics of looking at the world 37 and at themselves from the critical edge of modernity and coloniality. This 38

introduction 21

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 21 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th could ­potentially lead to in­de­pen­dent thinking, and to new coali­ ­tions 2 grounded not in ideology or stale geopolitics, but in other alter-­global hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 modes of thinking and being marked by a realization of our common hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 destiny as ­humans and striving to build a world in which no one would be hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 an “other” anymore. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 Art as an Effective Decolonial Force 8 9 This book focuses on a specific kind of decoloniality linked with percep- 10 tive mechanisms of aesthesis and further shaping not only of aesthetic and 11 ethical but also, inevitably, of po­liti­cal stances and agency that may become 12 power­ful mechanisms in decolonizing thinking, being, sensing, and corpo- 13 rality. After­ analyzing vari­ous spheres of decoloniality in the past decade,­ I 14 have come to the conclusion that con­temporary activist art that is closely 15 connected with corporality and affectivity—and,­ consequently, with the in- 16 tersection and problematizing of epistemic and ontological links—is the 17 area in which the most effective decolonial models emerge. It is this sphere 18 that gives some hope for the post-­Soviet ­future. 19 Unfortunately, the nature of the post-Soviet­ regimes—and­ particularly 20 of Russia—is for the state either­ to crush or to co-­opt any direct forms 21 of social and politi­ ­cal protest. Activists who do make it into public space 22 are generally unable to offer radically decolonizing agendas. Instead, they 23 continue to exist within the old logic of politi­ ­cal parties and movements, 24 which tend to be highly in­effec­tive in the strug­gle against global and local 25 forms of coloniality. Moreover, openly politi­ ­cal movements are immedi- 26 ately persecuted, and critical social and politi­ ­cal thought—­even that which 27 is purely theoretical—is banned, marginalized, or forced into exile. 28 Activism-­cum-­art—or “artivism” (Nikolayev 2011)—practices­ are be- 29 coming more effective in the conditions of the impasse and stagnation of 30 most social protest movements unable to influence the economic or po­liti­ 31 cal decisions. The artistic influence seems less immediate than any open 32 social or po­liti­cal dissent, yet it slowly works for the implementation of the 33 ­future radical changes through altering our thinking, and setting our con- 34 sciousness ­free from the global neoliberal or local jingoistic brainwashing. 35 Art in its visual, verbal and synthetic forms remains a crucial intersection 36 of being and knowledge and it is in the sphere of aesthesis untouched by 37 any normative aesthetic distortions that the most promising decolonizing 38 models start to emerge.

22 introduction

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 22 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 Activist art does not, however, exist in inherently safe space. It is also sub- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ject to repression. But it has at least two advantages: art is metaphorical­ by def- 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th inition and therefore slips more easily out of power’s grip; and the vagueness 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th of meta­phors, along with their ability to multiply often contradictory mean- 4 ings allows artists adjusting to new censorship and double-think­ situations. 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th According to Judith Butler (1997, 15), censorship is always in­effec­tive 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and unsuccessful from the start because­ any utterance is always multi-­ 7 semantic, particularly in the realms of art, fiction, film, and the humanities, 8 where the multiplicity of interpretations is axiomatic. At the same time, 9 open protests against censorship do not always solve the prob­lem as they 10 cannot shatter the system as such. On the contrary, we then build ourselves 11 into the system and play according to its rules, instead of overcoming the 12 system through its subversion from the inside or delinking from the system 13 and creating something in­de­pen­dent. The advantage of art is that it is able 14 to discuss the utmost questions without sliding into obvious propaganda 15 and open and univocal po­liti­cal engagement. 16 Indirect protest tactics and strategies of undermining power structures 17 from within have become well developed in postcolonial, posttotalitarian, 18 and postdictatorship art. Even Soviet censorship was an interactive process,­ 19 grounded in a peculiar and complex complicity of the censor and the cen- 20 sored. Censorship obviously “inhibited and provoked . . . ​authors” (Levine 21 1995, 2). It also acted as an impetus for stylistic innovation among artists 22 and helped develop in audiences a heightened sensitivity to the hidden and 23 the implied. The censor is always tormented by the “monologic terror of in- 24 determinacy” (Holquist 1994, 22) because­ it is not possi­ ­ble to fix meanings 25 once and for all, to cement interpretation in unequivocal aesthetic, po­liti­ 26 cal, or ethical ways. Multiplicity of interpretations, complex interconnec- 27 tion of negation and assertion in any censorship, and reiteration as its main 28 princi­ple, lead to restating of the very utterances censorship seeks to banish. 29 ­There are certainly many opposite examples of the obvious repressions 30 against the activist artists such as Pyotr Pavlensky, Pussy Riot, activist 31 art festival Media Impact, or Vyacheslav Akhunov. But art still has more 32 chances to avoid the punishment of repressive systems and offer a wider 33 specter of interpretations and opinions than any purely politi­ ­cal and ratio- 34 nalized forms of protest. In contrast with social theory, the immediate and 35 often nonrational affective form of art, is able to better and faster convey 36 the vague and undefined sensibilities of protest and affirmation of another 37 way of being that social theorists cannot formulate using their bulky and 38

introduction 23

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 23 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th slowly changing methodological apparatus—or that they are afraid to for- 2 mulate as they remain loyal to their rigid disciplinary frames. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 Obviously, con­temporary art seldom appeals to mass audiences even if hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 the majority of artists I will­ refer to in the book are far from being elitist hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 or living in any ivory tower. They are able to actively engage with the criti- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 cally thinking part of the educated and responsible ­people, who still reside 7 in the postsocialist countries. ­These are the ­people who attend exhibitions 8 of con­temporary art and are ready to discover something new and relate it 9 to their own experience. Such art initiatives are often closely linked with 10 social and politi­ ­cal movements and protests never completely merging 11 with them. 12 This book offers one possi­ ­ble view of decolonization in post-Soviet­ aes- 13 thesis. I hope that, in the future­ , more decolonial reflections on the post-­ 14 Soviet imaginary ­will be done via other spheres that are not necessarily 15 connected with art. However, art is the most promising sphere in the real- 16 ization of decoloniality in the pres­ent post-­Soviet space. 17 18 Beyond the TV-­Fridge Dichotomy 19 20 The art and artists discussed in this volume offer the exhausted post-Soviet­ 21 person a way beyond the dichotomy of the tv set and the refrigerator, 22 a way into a dif­fer­ent dimension in which ­there are other notions and be- 23 liefs besides bread and game. They are not proposing to place the tv set 24 inside the empty refrigerator, but rather to delink from this false, imposed 25 logic and see that ­there are many other options in the world and some of 26 them we can even initiate ourselves and start ­doing it already now. In this 27 regard, the post-­Soviet condition must not be seen as a lamentation of the 28 lost paradise, but rather as a way to re-­existence in a changing world in 29 which many worlds would correlate and where the experience of Socialist 30 modernity and its specific trajectory would shape one of the pos­si­ble open 31 models, intersecting but never entirely merging with ­others, and where 32 the previous hierarchical relations of the state, the market and the artists 33 would fi­nally give place to other forms of communication, praxis and pro- 34 duction of meanings. The art of the postsocialist world remains an effective 35 means of such a collective cathartic therapy, which is likely to help post-­ 36 Soviet citizens better understand ourselves and our place in the multiple 37 and complex world in the making and never again slide into the vicious 38 circle of forever dependent existence.

24 introduction

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 24 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 CHAPTER ONE 12 13 14 15 The Decolonial Sublime 16 17 18 19 20 21 For the post-­Soviet ­human condition that I attempted to sketch briefly in 22 the introduction, con­temporary artivism grounded in decolonization of the 23 affective sphere and in liberating aesthesis from the limitations of aesthet- 24 ics, is particularly impor­tant and promising for the ­future. But first, what 25 is meant by “aesthesis,” and what is the difference between aesthetics and 26 aesthesis? The term “aesthetics” was coined by Alexander Baumgarten 27 (1750) to indicate a shift from sensibility to a taste in good art with a spe- 28 cific material and market value, and to a mode of articulation among vari­ 29 ous forms of agency, production, perception, and thinking. Aesthetics was 30 a new institutionalized philosophical, moral, cultural, and social sphere, 31 which around the early nineteenth century­ , according to Jacques Rancière 32 (2009), shifted the previous representative regime of art to a contradictory 33 aesthetic one, gradually leading to the demise of art as such, to its dis- 34 solving and merging with other activities. Rancière stresses that aesthetics 35 was born during the French Revolution and therefore was bound up with 36 equality, a demo­cratic and liberating spirit that also signaled the ­future 37 deterioration of art that was grounded in a destruction of previous artistic 38

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 25 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th hierarchies, a dissolving of bound­aries between art and life, and also a shift 2 in relations between the passive sensibility and an active understanding of hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 art (Rancière 2009, 37). hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 Rancière (2009, 49) addresses the pres­ent reconfiguration of the po­liti­ hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 cal in aesthetic forms and confering on art the capacity to become an instru- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 ment of “reframing a sense of community and mending the social bond and 7 time that binds together practices, forms of visibility, and patterns of intel- 8 ligibility.” Conceptualizing his idea of the community of sense as “a certain 9 cutting out of space,” Rancière (2009, 31, 49) claims that “art does not do 10 politics by reaching the real. It does it by inventing fictions that challenge 11 the existing distribution of the real and the fictional. . . . ​Fiction invents 12 new communities of sense: that is to say, new trajectories between what can 13 be seen, what can be said, and what can be done.” It is hard to reanimate the 14 concept of community in such conditions without equating it to the liberal 15 understanding of the commonwealth or the Marxist idea of the commons. 16 What often remains unaddressed are the models accentuating the aesthetic, 17 sensual aspect of the politi­ ­cal and social spheres that go beyond ideology 18 as such. Rancière’s take on aesthetics and politics remains within the uni- 19 versalized Western social and economic realm, but his ideas on contradic- 20 tory political-aesthetic­ relations find parallels in a number of communal 21 models of indigenous ­people and decolonial social movements grounded 22 in intersectionality, which surpasses the simplified post-­Marxist approach. 23 The term “aesthesis” has a longer implicit genealogy since it refers to 24 an intrinsic ­human ability. “Aesthesis” literally means an ability to perceive 25 through the senses and the pro­cess of sensual perception itself—­visual, 26 tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and so on. “Aesthesis” is more familiar to the 27 general public as a Western postmodernist socio­ ­log­i­cal term discussed by, 28 among ­others, Michel Maffesoli inThe Time of the Tribes (1988).1 In this 29 well-­known book, Maffesoli starts and departs from an earlier phenom- 30 enological interpretation of aesthesis, as well as a number of nonorthodox 31 so­cio­log­i­cal theories such as Vilfredo Pareto’s model, to offer an aesthetic 32 ground for his famous idea of the re-­enchantment of the world. 33 However, Maffesoli’s understanding—­even if liberating and revolution- 34 ary for his time and context—is still limited as it is a critique of modernity 35 from within, from a postmodernist position that is selectively correcting 36 some of modernity’s features but leaving the core and, particularly, its darker 37 colonial side intact. Maffesoli understands aesthesis as a pro­cess of total 38 aestheticization of the lifeworld in the collective consciousness of a tribe

26 chapter 1

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 26 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 (a reunification of ethics and aesthetics). He means a critique of rationality hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and its replacement with intuitivism, sensuality, and emotional responses 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and also a critique of individualism and its replacement with new tribal- 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ism and group consciousness. Yet Maffesoli’s tribes, as well as Deleuze and 4 Guattari’s (1993) war machine, are utopian constructions rather than real 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th social groups. Although Maffesoli assumed that the total aestheticization 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th of the lifeworld leads to the emergence of group ethics, empathy, and prox- 7 eny, and hence provides the possibility for an organic compromise between 8 ­people, this assumption remains hy­po­thet­i­cal. Moreover, the multitude of 9 marginal communities with their presumable spirit of emotional complic- 10 ity to which Maffesoli appeals, are still Western communities (such as 11 hippies, anarchists, various­ con­temporary experimental artists). They are 12 unhappy with the system and capable of creating a rallying aesthesis as an 13 immanent transcendence. 14 But in Maffesoli’s interpretation, ­these new tribes are largely confined 15 by contesting Western social movements and neo-­avant-­garde art. As is 16 known, many such groups wer­ e dissatisfied with Euro­ ­pean philosophical 17 traditions that did not allow one to move away from logocentrism. There- 18 fore, the new tribalists started looking in the direction of Eastern and Am- 19 erindian cosmologies and vari­ous marginalized occult practices, which in 20 itself was a form of colonization and appropriation of someone else’­ s axiologi- 21 cal legacy—­a typical and well-­rehearsed scenario of modernity. Moreover, 22 this initially sincere revolutionary protest was soon tamed by the system. 23 In fact, it was a doomed attempt to reform the system from within. The 24 new tribalists’ interest in the other remained largely an exotic desire to 25 possess the other, not a genuine wish to learn more about this other. Such 26 artificial affective excitement by means of alien cosmological instruments 27 was predictably short-­lived. And ­today. Maffesoli’s old new tribes have 28 given way to David Brooks’s “Bobos” (2000)—­a hybrid of the bohème and 29 the bourgeoisie, in which aestheticization of protest has acquired safe and 30 decorative forms. The neoliberal market and commodification mecha- 31 nisms have easily infected the presumably autonomous artistic sphere and 32 discredited and trivialized any naïve and honest ideals such as community 33 and participation. 34 The pres­ent repoliticization of aesthetics takes place in rather bland and 35 anonymous everyday forms of essentially apo­liti­cal practices pretending to 36 be po­liti­cal, often with a focus on communicative and participatory practices 37 and drives. A typical example is Nicolas Bourriaud’s problematic relational 38

the decolonial sublime 27

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 27 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th aesthetics and his altermodern project­ (Bourriaud 2002b, 2009). Similarly 2 to Maffesoli three de­cades ago, Bourriaud attempts to catch and reproduce hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 the new sensibility assuming that globalization has successfully made this hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 world homogenous and unified and its subjects have become identical and hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 equal. Bourriaud sees the darker side of this homogeneity in the image of the hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 globally standardizing cap­i­tal­ist system yet refuses to notice any power dif- 7 ferences within it, condescendingly dismissing both postmodernism (as an 8 outdated ideology and historical narrative) and postcolonialism and identity 9 politics, which in his view have already fulfilled their obligations (Bourriaud 10 2009). In this re­spect he echoes the idea of post-­Fordist dissolving of the 11 previous power hierarchies through an emergence of radical democracy for 12 the multiplicity of multitudes (Hardt and Negri 2005). 13 Obviously, this claim is being formulated once again from a familiar, 14 disembodied Western vantage point, neglecting the growing asymmetries 15 and hiding appropriation ­behind the concept of the Marxist commons. Ac- 16 centuating creolization,2 simplified and intensified contacts, migrations 17 and journeys, and subtitles and translations as the landmarks of the new 18 universal altermodern culture from which all artists, as Bourriaud claims, 19 draw their techniques and devices, he once again appropriates concepts 20 coming from non-­Western theoretical paradigms, ignoring specific local 21 contexts and histories of their emergence. Instead of Maffesoli’s neo-­ 22 tribalism and re-­enchantment with the magic and irrational, Bourriaud of- 23 fers a too banal fascination with Internet and computer technologies and 24 computer metaphors­ such as “user-­friendliness”; “do-it-­ ­yourself interactiv- 25 ity” ’ and the artist as engineer, programmer, or dj, oversimplifying both 26 con­temporary real­ity and art (Bourriaud 2002a, 2009). 27 But let us delink from Maffesoli’s understanding of aesthesis and rely 28 on the decolonial interpretation of this category. With the emergence of 29 explicit aesthetics in secular modernity, aesthesis was globally subsumed. 30 It was a part of the wider process­ of colonization of being, knowledge, 31 and perception that tagged the Eu­ro­pean past as premodern (traditional) and 32 the non-­European past and present­ as nonmodern and therefore nonhu- 33 man. This has led to strict formulations of what is beautiful and sublime, 34 good and evil, and to the emergence of par­tic­u­lar canonical structures and 35 ­artistic genealogies. 36 Certainly the Western genealogy of thought revolted against such nor- 37 mative aesthetics long before Maffesoli. As amatter­ of fact, the philosophi- 38 cal revolt against ratio-­centrism initiated by the end of the nineteenth

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 28 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 ­century questioned the notorious “knowing subject,” in Wilhelm Dilthey’s hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th formulation, and envisioned a being that not only thinks but also ­wills 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and feels (Dilthey 1991, 50). In many ways, Maffesoli follows in this path. 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Maffesoli’s decolonial interpretations of aesthesis share a problematizing 4 of rationality and prescriptive aesthetic normativity, along with a focus on 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th the collective experience as opposed to individual experience. Yet they do 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th this from dif­fer­ent geopo­liti­cal and corpo-­political positions and trajecto- 7 ries of knowledge, perception, and being. 8 Decolonial aesthesis originates in the affective experience of ­those who 9 have never been given a voice before and who also often have been (mis) 10 represented and appropriated by Maffesoli’s new tribalists in the purely 11 decorative form of noble savages and native infor­ ­mants, Calibans and Ariels. 12 Such non-­Western subjects are more sensitive to the corporeal dimensions 13 of knowledge, perception, creativity, sexuality, and gender. In their experi- 14 ence, constructed bodily difference is constantly put forward, essentialized, 15 and problematized, whereas they are seen or made invisible exclusively 16 through their bodily difference. 17 Positioned at the intersection of ontology and epistemology, aesthesis 18 acts as a mechanism to produce and regulate sensations; hence, it is inevita- 19 bly linked with the body as an instrument of perception that mediates our 20 cognition. Our bodies adapt to spaces through local histories—­collective 21 and personal. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981, 23) famously 22 called this a “theory in the flesh,” stressing the importance of the “physical 23 realities of our lives,” which “fuse to create a politics born out of necessity.” 24 Setting aesthesis fr­ ee lets us delink from the dominant politics of knowl- 25 edge, being, and perception, which is grounded in suppression of the 26 geo-­historical dimensions of affects and corporalities. Decolonial aesthesis 27 grows out of the geopoliti­ ­cal and corpo-­political position of the “outside 28 created from the inside” (Dussel 1985), liberating us from often uncon- 29 scious but per­sis­tent total control over sensations to which our bodies react, 30 in Walter Mignolo’s (2011) formulation. To do this, it is necessary to decol- 31 onize the knowledge that regulates aesthesis and the subjectivities that are 32 controlled by Western modern/postmodern/altermodern aesthetics. Only 33 then ­will it become pos­si­ble to make a paradigmatic shift from often nega- 34 tive and destructive re­sis­tance to creative and life-­asserting “re-­existence,” 35 in Adolfo Albán Achinte’s words (2006). 36 Albán Achinte explains that when a human­ being exists in the core of the 37 colonial matrix as an other with no rights, for such a person an inclusion 38

the decolonial sublime 29

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 29 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and an active reworking of odors, tastes, colors, and sounds of his or her 2 ancestors and the remaking of systematically negated forms of interactions hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 with the world—of being and perception—­become a necessity, a sensual hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 response of re­sis­tance and of building of one’s own existence anew in defi- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 ance of coloniality (Albán Achinte 2009). Re-­existence then becomes an hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 effective decolonial strategy. (re-)creating the positive life models, sensa- 7 tions, and worlds that help to overcome the injustice and imperfection of 8 the pres­ent world. Re-­existence is far from a primordialist call to return to 9 some essentialized and constructed authenticity. On the contrary, it is 10 a way to relive the main elements­ of erased and distorted indigenous (or 11 any other discarded) value systems while necessarily taking into account 12 the temporal lag and experiences of strug­gle and opposition, compromises 13 and losses, that have taken place. In other words, re-­existence is not mere 14 repetition; it is variation in which there­ is not only always a stable core but 15 also a necessary creative element­ of difference, and hence of dynamics and 16 change. What is at work ­here is a development of the native tradition in 17 dialogue and in a constant argument with modernity. It is a complication 18 and an enrichment of our perspective, a constant balancing on the verge—­ 19 neither ­here nor ­there or si­mul­ta­neously ­here, ­there, and elsewhere. De- 20 colonial aesthesis lets our sensations, and consequently the assumptions 21 we form on their basis, move forward and beyond the normative models of 22 truth, beauty, and goodness, ­whether they are Western or native. 23 As a species, we share the ability to use si­mul­ta­neously two dif­fer­ent 24 mechanisms of orientation and regulation of our behav­ ­ior—­the intellec- 25 tual and the affective—intersecting­ them in the aesthetic sphere. ­Human 26 mechanisms of perception may be universal, yet the manifestations of the 27 affects and modes of our perception are always locally, historically, and 28 culturally specific. Looking at the world from the “underside of modernity” 29 (Dussel 1996, 21), decolonial artists and thinkers reflect on how they in- 30 habit the colonial matrix of power, geograph­ ­i­cally and corpographically; how 31 they respond to it aesthetically; and how can they overcome the per­sis­ 32 tent exoticization, appropriation, and condescending labeling (as “naive,” 33 “ethnic,” “primitivist,” “ornamentalist,” “stylized,” and so on) of their works 34 within the predictable Western frames. By doing­ this they enact a process­ 35 that is opposed to the naturalized (in Western modernity) delocalization 36 and disembodiment of thinking and feeling, which in fact has hidden the 37 provincialism of Western Euro­ ­pean aesthetic principles­ subsequently ren- 38 dered universal.

30 chapter 1

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 30 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 Decolonial aesthesis, on the contrary, draws attention to the geopo­ hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th liti­cal location of aesthetic colonization and evolves, through practices of 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th emancipation of experience, corporality, and affectivity, from the creative 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th mechanisms, norms, and limitations of artificially delocalized and disem- 4 bodied (post-)(alter)modern aesthetics. The decolonial emancipation of 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th aesthesis leads to a reinvention of the concept of art itself, reuniting its 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ontological, ethical, po­liti­cal, and epistemic potential through subversion, 7 disidentification, tricksterism, er ­sis­tance, and re-­existence. This makes 8 intricate forms of contemporar­ y aesthetic colonization, such as boutique 9 multiculturalism and commodified exoticism, vis­i­ble as ways to appropri- 10 ate and tame the other and to exclude ­those who refuse to comply. 11 Con­temporary aesthetic theory is predominantly post-­Marxist and 12 largely universalist. It tends to erase geopo­liti­cal and corpo-­political affec- 13 tive differences. Hence, it stumbles against the same age-­old prob­lem of 14 ­either taking the non-­Western other to sameness or fetishizing its differ- 15 ence. When the same logic is applied to art, this dilemma once again takes 16 the form of assimilating to the mainstream norm or being relegated to the 17 non-­Western ghetto of ethnic arts and crafts. W. E. B. Du Bois and his fol- 18 lowers strug­gled with the ontological question of what it means to be a 19 (­human) prob­lem (Gordon 2007). In the aesthetic sphere, this question 20 changes into, “What does it mean to be an artist if you are seen as a prob­ 21 lem? What kind of art you are expected to produce, and what can you do to 22 escape the Procrustean bed of such prescribed definitions that want you to 23 be ­either a mere craftsman or an object of someone ­else’s art?” 24 One of the key categories of Western canonical aesthetics is the sublime, 25 which plays a central role in the mechanism of catharsis. Immanuel Kant’s 26 The Critique of Judgment (1951 [1790]) presents­ a classical theorizing of this 27 pro­cess, which stresses such outcomes of successful subliminal experience 28 as regaining one’s dignity; setting one’s mind and imagination ­free; and 29 sending a person through a purgatory, which enables moral elevation and 30 re­sis­tance to the forces of nature. In the case of the decolonial sublime, 31 Kantian nature is replaced by modernity/coloniality and our belonging to it 32 in vari­ous capacities—­from objects to subjects, from critics to accomplices 33 and ­those who delink from it. Global coloniality is then illuminated in an 34 image or a meta­phor, momentarily lighting up the trajectory of further 35 epistemic, ethical, aesthetic, and existential solidarity in subversion. 36 The cathartic mechanism is grounded in demonstrating the darker side 37 of modernity—­that of vio­lence, injustice, the dehumanization of the large 38

the decolonial sublime 31

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 31 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th groups of people,­ the objectification of nature, and the delocalization of his- 2 torically and culturally bound experience. Decolonial sublime acts through hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 parody, irony, canonical counterdiscourse, deliberate and aestheticized hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 nostalgia, grotesque, chiasmus, overlay. This sublime is not based on fear, hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 as in the Kantian model, or plea­sure linked with fear of the insignificant hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 ­human being in front of the greatness of nature. Consequently, Kantian 7 re­sis­tance to the forces of nature as an outcome of the sublime—­and even 8 Bruce Robbins’s (2002) model of the sweatshop sublime as a realization of 9 the global socioeconomic dimensions of being—­are replaced with indig­ 10 nation, repentance, hope, solidarity, and, most impor­tant, resolutions to 11 change the world to restore human­ dignity and the right to be oneself. The 12 decolonial sublime dynamically combines the rational and the emotional 13 in its constant multispatial hermeneutical effort (Tlostanova and Mignolo 14 2009), which requires active understanding instead of passive perception. 15 The decolonial sublime de-­automatizes our perception to push us in the 16 direction of agency—­ethical, po­liti­cal, social, creative, epistemic, and exis- 17 tential. This leads to serious shifts in how we interpret the world and relate 18 to other people.­ The decolonial sublime is grounded in overcoming in an 19 existential or Zen Buddhist sense, in transcending in the Kantian sense, 20 or, better yet, in transmodern delinking,3 after­ which the artist and the audi- 21 ence need to relink with something or someone. ­Here, the negative re­sis­ 22 tance gives way to a positive re-­existence. As essentially border thinkers 23 and dwellers, decolonial artists delink from and relink with various­ West- 24 ern and non-­Western models, whereas the temporal dimension of such art 25 negates any progressive unidirectionality and opts for the simultaneity of 26 many times and spaces instead. 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

32 chapter 1

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 32 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 CHAPTER TWO 12 13 14 15 Decolonial Aesthesis and Post-­Soviet Art 16 17 18 19 20 21 The post-­Soviet subject is no doubt a theoretical construct whose valid- 22 ity is always threatened by its extreme heterogeneity. Yet ­there are certain 23 social, po­liti­cal, cultural, and aesthetic factors­ that not only bind us all to- 24 gether, even after­ twenty-­five years of the post-­Soviet experience, but also 25 make us occupy a par­tic­u­lar nonspace in contemporar­ y global coloniality 26 and often trigger decolonial aesthetic drives among post-Soviet­ artists and 27 thinkers. The affective sphere remains one of the very few areas left for the 28 construction of a positive identity. The specificity of decolonial drives in 29 the post-­Soviet space is connected with their local histories and configura- 30 tions of imperial difference. As a result, ­those locales that claim a (second- 31 ary and precarious) Eu­ro­pean belonging, at first demonstrate a catching-up 32 complex and a longing to fi­nally assimilate and become one with the old 33 Eu­rope (Kalnačs 2016a, 2016b). Later,­ many of them become disillusioned 34 and turn to discursive and represen­ ­ta­tional self-­postcolonization and self-­ 35 subalternization that, in its turn in some cases, develops into a decolonial 36 sensibility (Jirgens 2006; Kovačević 2008). 37 38

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 33 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th In clearly non-European­ locales such as Central Asia and the Cauca- 2 sus, decolonial drives are coded through postcolonial symbolism that hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 is still marked by a difference between the Second World and the Third hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 World. In a neoimperial space of Rus­sia the appropriation of decolonial hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 discourse takes its most dangerous form ­today: it is an imperial Soviet hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 self-­affirmation at the expense of blackening the stronger imperial rivals 7 and racially stigmatizing the entire former colonial others—­ ­its own and 8 someone ­else’s. In the center of this configuration stands an ethnic Rus­ 9 sian who practices white supremacy in front of any non-­Europeans, and 10 resents being rejected by the Western society which does not see him as 11 part of its racial sameness. It is not surprising that Russian­ propaganda has 12 offered one of the most malevolent and reactionary interpretations of the 13 Eu­ro­pean refugee crisis (Shimov 2016). The recurrent argument was that 14 Eu­rope should let in and venerate the civilized white Christian mi­grants 15 (i.e., racialized post-Soviet­ groups) instead of the “Muslim savages.” Often 16 this discourse interlocks with National Bolshevism and its aftermath or 17 balances on the verge of openly fascist, ultra-right­ ideology.1 The projection 18 of decolonial arguments onto the racially same poor and disenfranchised 19 ­others in con­temporary Rus­sia often takes the form of juxtaposing the pro- 20 vincial regions as colonized territories with Moscow as the evil metropolis 21 sucking the blood out of its own citizens. The darker side of this appro- 22 priation of the decolonial discourse is xenophobia and chauvinism. It is 23 yet another erasing of the prob­lems of real (post)colonial ­others. This is a 24 dangerous development for decolonial option: the very ease with which 25 the most radical reactionary forces appropriate its ideas—­from National 26 Bolshevism (which ­today quickly turns into a glamorous form of fascism) to 27 Alexander Dugin’s neo-­Eurasianist imperialism2—­leaves a door open for the 28 most negative scenarios that, unfortunately, can easily come true in Rus­sia. 29 The decolonial option can be used and abused by such problematic forces 30 as easily as it is appropriated by grassroots initiatives and social movements. 31 One of the in­ter­est­ing examples of such a creative yet problematic appro- 32 priation of decolonial discourse in con­temporary Rus­sia, which at times can 33 slide into National Bolshevik discourse, is the Bombily Art Group, repre- 34 sented by Anton Nikolayev and Alexander Rossihin (Nikolayev 2011). 35 36 37 38

34 chapter 2

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 34 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 Bombily and the Decolonial Option hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th The strange name of the group evokes the image of the bombers in a literal 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th sense. Yet it can also be translated into En­glish as “cabbies” meaning illegal 4 cab ­drivers with no license. This name is connected with one of the oc- 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th cupations of its members that not only brought them additional means of 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th survival but, more impor­tant, allowed them to meet and speak with vari­ous 7 passengers and discuss the social and politi­ ­cal prob­lems of con­temporary 8 Rus­siaduring the ­ride. This group’s style, aptly called “Moscow Infantilism” 9 (Parshikov 2008), is pointedly opposed to any conceptual and purely intel- 10 lectual art that tends to be far from real­ity and the common ­people in the 11 street. In most of its actions, the Bombily Art Group attempts to find ways 12 back to the common ­people and elaborates a specific language that appeals 13 to emotions rather than to the intellect. This is their way of decolonizing 14 aesthesis. 15 One of Bombily’s most in­ter­est­ing actions took place in May 2007, in 16 collaboration with members of theinternationally better-known­ group 17 Voyna (War) (Epshtein 2012). It was called “White Line,” and consisted 18 in the symbolic cleaning of Russia­ by expelling the evil forces that have 19 planted themselves in the city center and, according to the group’s blog, 20 “drawing the line between the righteous­ and unrighteous.­ ”3 In spite of 21 Bombily’s infantile pre­sen­ta­tion the roots of this perfor­ ­mance clearly went 22 back to Nikolai Gogol’s macabre novelette Viy (1835), in which the main 23 character was fighting with the devil and his accomplices by drawing a 24 white line around himself and reciting a Christian prayer. In Bombily’s 25 modern per­for­mance, the participants drew a white chalk line around the 26 Moscow Garden Ring which traditionally divides the center of the city 27 from its more demo­cratic outskirts. Thus the activists encircled the evil 28 zone and erected an invisible magical wall around it that went uninter- 29 rupted, despite highways, bridges, and underground paths. 30 ­Later Bombily proj­ects included several car trips to provincial Rus­sian 31 towns, documented in road movies that attempt to reflect the differences 32 between “Planet Moscow” and its many satellites living in dif­fer­ent times 33 and with dif­fer­ent expectations for the ­future. Once again, the driving 34 force was to try to break through and find a way of surviving for the ordi- 35 nary ­human being in the outskirts of the former empire with no glamorous 36 metropolitan symbols around and often with a clear realization of the doomed 37 ­future. Several years ago, Anton Nikolayev, an art theorist, musician, activist, 38

post-­soviet art 35

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 35 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and member of the Bombily Art Group, became interested in the decolonial 2 option. The imperial difference that Nikolayev obviously represents ­selects hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 for itself certain parts of decolonial discourse that can be problematic, hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 ­because it shows the possi­ ­ble darker side of the decolonial option when and hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 if it is reinterpreted through the imperial difference. It then slidestowar­ d hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 National Bolshevism, with its peculiar imperial revivalism grounded not in 7 the idea of race or religion but rather some cultural, linguistic and broadly 8 leftist egalitarian community that is initially color-­blind as it is interested 9 in coopting as many dif­fer­ent ­people as pos­si­ble into its ranks. But eventu- 10 ally this discourse can evolve into radical nationalism and fascism. It was 11 not by chance that Nikolayev publicly joined Limonov’s National Bolshevik 12 Party ­after it was banned in Russia.­ In this gesture there­ was as much politics 13 as actionist protest aesthetics. 14 In a recent conversation with Nikolayev, I told him that I was very sur- 15 prised by his ardent interest in the decolonial option because­ I more often 16 findlike- ­minded peopleamong racialized and colonized groups or artists. 17 I wanted to understand what initially attracted him to decoloniality and 18 what ele­ments of decolonial thought he found relevant. Nikolayev pointed 19 out that, in his view, post-­Soviet Rus­sia resembles a number of Latin Amer- 20 ican countries that over the past few decades­ have shaped­ their own, spe- 21 cific po­liti­cal discourse. He admitted that certain features of decolonial 22 thinking such as theology of liberation or decolonization might seem to 23 be exotic. Yet it occurred to him that something similar could emerge in 24 Rus­sia by analogy. The most attractive feature of decolonial discourse for 25 Nikolayev is its optional nature (Mignolo, Escobar 2009), the fact that it 26 does not require a strict adherence and does not attempt to replace all pre- 27 vious and existing discourses, but offers an alternative (option) that one 28 can freely choose: 29 The optional discourse of decolonization sounds like something 30 that the minorities should speak, the autonomous regions and the 31 ­home-­rule local communities. In other words, I became interested 32 in decoloniality in a political-technological­ way. I see it as a possi­ ­ble 33 theoretical basis for a social technology that would be accessible 34 and tactically con­ve­nient for the most microscopic agents of civil so- 35 ciety. This is the most impor­tant element­ of decolonial discourse that 36 I found not only inter­ ­est­ing but also practically useful in its optional- 37 ity. Also, as an artist and a critic I was interested in the concept of 38

36 chapter 2

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 36 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 aesthesis, which works well for the description of process-based­ and hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th network art.4 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 To me it seems that ­there are certain aspects of Nikolayev’s works which hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 can indeed be interpreted in a decolonial way. Mainly it refers to the radi- 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th cal artistic reflection and actionism linked to the dichotomy of the city 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and the province and the embodiment of certain centrifugal tendencies 7 that are becoming quite palpable ­today. For instance, he has made a series 8 of road movies in many Russian­ provincial towns and has contributed a 9 lot to the development of artist-in-­ ­residence programs at the Guslitsa art 10 center outside Moscow.5 It is therefore tempting to compare the boundary 11 between Moscow and provincial Russia­ to the divide between metropolis 12 and colony and hence label this as some kind of internal colonization. 13 Nikolayev reacted to this idea through criticizing the federalist po­liti­cal 14 model. He opposed it to the strong local self-rule­ lamenting that, according 15 to the Rus­sian Constitution, local governments are not part of the official -or 16 gans of power and are in fact, exiled to the civil spherewhich is closer to the 17 society than any public policy. The activist stated: “Decolonization seems to 18 me precisely an attempt at bridging the ­people and the local government. 19 “At the same time, starting from the hypothesis that local governments in 20 Rus­sia could develop thanks, among other ­things, to in­de­pen­dent network 21 structures, it turns out, quite unexpectedly, that federalism is a serious rival 22 to any local self-­rule that has not yet elaborated its own language. In other 23 words, ­there could be a competition between federalism and decoloniza- 24 tion, and this is quite pos­si­ble in the political-­technological sense.” 6 25 In contrast with other theorists’ views on the fundamentalist backlash, 26 for Nikolayev the present-­day Russian­ duality and division is structured 27 around the ruthless competition of the two proj­ects—­the inertial progres- 28 sivist Soviet one and the post–Pinochet­ rightist project,­ neither of which 29 has yet been properly conceptualized. He believes that the Latin American 30 experience of both options, which have already played out in many dif­fer­ 31 ent ways and more than once, could provide valuable lessons for Russia­ 32 as well, and particularly in the ngo sector and volunteer organ­izations, 33 which are largely lacking the necessary conceptual instruments for their 34 motivation. 35 I was also interested to learn if and how Nikolayev links the decolonial 36 discourse with his own artivism and more widely with the radical activist art 37 in Rus­sia. It was crucial to understandhow such radical activist art envisions 38

post-­soviet art 37

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 37 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th its own ­future in an increasingly repressive society and how it assesses its 2 chances to affect this society in any significant way. This is particularly hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 impor­tant in Rus­sia’s changing po­liti­cal situation, when the artists are torn hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 between state censorship and the necessity to become a commodity. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 In this department Nikolayev’s response demonstrated a much more hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 mainstream artist’s and critic’s position than I expected. He pointed out 7 the paradox of artivism: the more actions we take, the less art ­those actions 8 can contain. He also linked art as such with the concept of newness and the 9 “increment of knowledge,” which betrays persis­ ­tent and unconscious links 10 to modernity. Nikolayev is aware of the traps of artivism such as becoming 11 unfocused; losing aesthetic significance as it becomes a mere functional 12 ele­ment of politics. Yet he is optimistic in his view of the actionist future:­ 13 Actionism and other quasi-theatrical­ genres share a wonderful qual- 14 ity: they are able to resurrect themselves approximately ­every ten 15 years. Socie­ties can seriously change their highlights in such a time 16 span, and it makes sense again to stage the provoking events, and 17 receive a dif­fer­ent specter of reactions. However, when the restricted 18 tools of actionism are quickly played out, actionism, somehow, leaves 19 the zone of art and becomes something strictly applied and escap- 20 ing any positive aesthetic criteria. Repre­sen­ta­tion remains a difficult 21 theoretical prob­lem for con­temporary art. ­There is hope that the tem- 22 poral extension of art, and the shift from object to process­ and to net- 23 working, allow an escape from conservative repre­sen­ta­tional frames 24 and alleviate the repressive impact of the system. But it is not yet 25 clear how true and how impor­tant this is.7 26 27 While speaking with Nikolayev I also had a feeling that due to his much 28 younger than most of my other respondents, he did not remember the Soviet 29 Socialist context other than through his understandably idealizing child- 30 hood experience. ­There was an obvious generation gap between those­ who 31 suffered from repression and censorship and those­ who nurtured vari­ous 32 forms of Soviet nostalgia. His reaction to my question on his attitude ­toward 33 Soviet and post-­Soviet sensibilities, he said, confirming ym suspicion, 34 I believe that the Soviet project­ was better than all others­ ­because I 35 feel close to it and we can all be reflected in it as in a mirror. I am at- 36 tracted by the progressivist part of the Soviet project;­ by its promise 37 of the revolutionary renewal of the world. Also the Soviet attitude 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 38 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 ­toward science and education was good. Moreover, the Soviet system hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th is attractive ­because of its ideology of the social state and its efforts to 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th reach every­one. ­There are a lot of negative sides, as well. The USSR is 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th our mirror and our matrix, which we are bound to continue reflect- 4 ing on for centuries. The question is not whether­ we should discard 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th or keep the Soviet legacy—it is impossible to discard one’s own his- 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th tory, ­after all—­but how we will­ fi­nally reassemble it all. That is why 7 local self-­government and its connections with decolonization seem 8 impor­tant for this matrix recomposition to be maximally profound.8 9 10 11 Multiplying Differences, or The Colonial Difference of the 12 Imperial Difference 13 In this section, I analyze tendencies towar­ d decolonialization in post-Soviet­ 14 art by concentrating exclusively on those­ groups and people­ who share the 15 postcolonial and post-­Soviet predicament and who ­were, and are, “­others” 16 in the modern/colonial designs—­Czarist, Soviet, national(ist) post-Soviet,­ 17 and neoliberal global. 18 Postcolonial post-­Soviet subjects experience a specific form of double-­ 19 consciousness. In the USSR it was connected with a division between 20 ­Soviet and national cultures, which sometimes merged in boutique mul- 21 ticulturalist forms, such as when official aesthetics prescribed how a 22 ­national/ethnic author or artist should write or paint. Toda­ y the situation 23 is even more paradoxical. ­There is a new official and safe norm adapted for 24 the national art as opposed to unofficial critical art. The latter may be -na 25 tional in its spirit, but in its own dynamic forms, which are often far from 26 any frozen and completely constructed authenticity. This is threatening to 27 the post-­Soviet nation-­states, but also sells well in the West. As a result any 28 serious and critical artist-­activists (artivists) ends up in yet another dead 29 end, between the devil of the state and the deep blue sea of the market. 30 Post-­Soviet postcolonial artists then experiences an unpleasant déjà vu 31 that, in some cases may lead to a development of decolonial sensibility. In 32 the Soviet system artists had an uneasy choice between the Eurocentric aca- 33 demic education and their consent to play the role of craftsmen, reproduc- 34 ing the presumably age-­old traditions in a restricted area of the so-­called 35 national/ethnic arts. In colleges and universities, the national departments 36 of art, language and lit­er­a­ture, dance, and ­music ­were always considered 37 nonprestigious and therefore ­were easier to enroll. On the surface, this 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 39 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th looked like a cele­bration of Soviet affirmative action, but ineal r ­ity this 2 structure strangled any real development of national/ethnic cultures in the hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 colonies except in the Soviet package of the national in its form and social- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 ist in its essence. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 The students of ­these national departments ­were not taught any theo- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 retical disciplines, and even the obligatory survey courses in the history of 7 art, lit­er­a­ture, or ­music, in their case ­were considerably shortened and sim- 8 plified. From the very start then a hierarchy was established, within which 9 it was taken for granted that artists do not need to know Renoir if they are 10 ­going to paint pahta (cotton flower) ornaments onpiy ālas (traditional cen- 11 tral Asian cups in the form of small bowls mostly used for serving tea) for the 12 rest of their lives; musicians do not need to know Mozart if they are going­ 13 to play zurna (traditional woodwind instrument similar to oboe, known in 14 many countries of Central Eurasia)for the next fifty years; and poets do not 15 need to know Shakespeare if they are ­going to recycle traditional oral poetic 16 forms imbuing them with Socialist contents (e.g., by eulogizing collective 17 farms and Lenin instead of national heroes and warriors). One can naively 18 interpret this positively and say that if Mozart and Shakespeare symbolize 19 Eurocentric values, then the indigenous ­people and the colonized groups 20 may have been better off in Soviet academic institutions, since they ­were 21 not asked or offered to study the Western tradition. Yet this was also a cun- 22 ning form of coloniality, whereas the real way out should have been letting 23 the young artists study both models, without constructing hierarchies. 24 At the same time, the interpretation of ethnic-­national culture in this 25 case was reduced to a set of simple­ devices that presumably could be ap- 26 plied to any content, including the ideologically Soviet one. Thus the study 27 of native culture, art, or cosmology was limited to training the future­ artists 28 how to use ­these devices, whereas the axiological grounds ­behind indig- 29 enous art ­were wiped off or made invisible. Luckily, this Soviet requirement 30 was not followed too strictly and the colonies still had many masters, who 31 continued to teach their pupils how to be in the world, and not just how to 32 paint a pretty cotton flower on tea bowls. Certainly the restored and main- 33 tained accent on cosmological links between art and knowledge, art and 34 the existential sphere, and art and con­temporary life, instead of a purely 35 instrumental understanding of art as a frozen repetitive device, had to be 36 hidden to avoid Soviet repression. And it took many efforts by both the 37 masters and their pupils to reconnect the native cosmology as a living en- 38 tity and their everyday lives, in which any ethnic culture was always effec-

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 40 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 9 1 tively limited to be represented just as a decoration (Abbasov 2005). The hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th artists could practice resis­ ­tance only mentally or in indirect ways because­ 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th any art that stepped outside the Soviet multiculturalist model immediately 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th landed its creators in prison as bourgeois nationalists. 4 If one chose classical academic education in the art and the humanities, 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th one had to reject all native ethnic-national­ ele­ments and become homo- 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th geneously Soviet (that is Western and Rus­sian in terms of aesthetics, and 7 Socialist in terms of ideology). Yet since these­ artists ­were still not Rus­ 8 sian (or Western) by origin, they had to know their place and be forever 9 confined to a secondary status—­for instance, to be good imitators of the 10 “­great” Rus­sian/Soviet Socialist realists. ­There was no possibility for com- 11 bining the consciously selected Western techniques and some national-­ 12 ethnic aesthetic identifications. hisT was a weird Soviet/colonial form of 13 doubleconsciousness. One could expect that after­ the collapse of the Soviet 14 system the ethnic-­national art, ­music, and lit­er­a­ture fi­nally had a chance to 15 develop their own forms rather than continue to be imitations of the West- 16 ern or Russian­ originals or prescribed multiculturalist oeuvres. However 17 the long awaited renais­ ­sance of indigenous art never really­ happened. The 18 national continued to exist in its decorative forms. They just got rid of the 19 collective farms and Lenin and replaced ­these recurrent images with arti- 20 ficially in­ven­ted ancient traditions that wer­ e con­ve­nient for the new old 21 elites. In the end ­there was another void. Any links with ethnic-­national 22 art forms, cosmologies and axiologies ­were irreparably destroyed. And this 23 was one of the most appalling successes of the Soviet époque. 24 And yet ­there are still artists who manage to critically and dynami- 25 cally engage with their national-­ethnic ele­ments, and Western and ­Rus­sian 26 canons, as well as with dif­fer­ent subversive traditions within them. They 27 try to remake and problematize all of ­these ele­ments in their works. ­These 28 impulses are decidedly decolonial, as the artists criticize both global 29 ­modernity/coloniality and provincial local color from their border position. 30 It is this kind of disobeying and delinking trickster artist that the repressive 31 neo­co­lo­nial and neoimperial post-Soviet­ regimes dread most. The return 32 of repressive, and often fundamentalist, national and religious communi- 33 ties of sense ­today is often regarded as an echo of the Soviet époque; con- 34 sequently, protests against this new-­old repression often take the form of 35 revisiting the dissident anti-­Soviet past. 36 Post-­Soviet artists coming from or connected with traditionally Mus- 37 lim regions, often reconstruct and deconstruct the Islamic sides of their 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 41 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th identities in decolonial ways fully understanding both the constraining na- 2 ture of global modernity/coloniality, and the strangling power of any reli- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 gious fundamentalism. ­These ­people do not simply go back to Islam ­after hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 the de­cades of the forced secular Rus­sian/Soviet modernity. Rather, they hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 are looking at the Muslim symbols and signs through the critical lens of hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 modernity/coloniality without taking sides, and constantly negotiating their 7 creolized bordering forms of secular Western/Rus­sian (post-­Soviet) and 8 native/Muslim sensibilities. In the 1990s, artists from the Caucasus and 9 Central Asia, tired of the old socialist in essence and national/ethnic in 10 form formula, turned to vari­ous neo-­mythological forms of repre­sen­ta­tion 11 by means of recurrent leitmotivs and symbols such as dung, felt, trains, 12 heroes, and the Silk Road (Gamzatova 2009). This can be seen as part of a 13 wider phenomenon of ethnic re­nais­sance that started in the Soviet Union 14 in the 1970s–80s and contributed to its demise from within. The 2000s 15 brought global and local social and politi­ ­cal real­ity back into the art in Cen- 16 tral Asia and the Caucasus. Many works attempted to re-­create a dynamic, 17 if contradictory, dialogue between cosmological roots and contemporar­ y 18 conditions, between local histories and global designs, in the destinies of 19 ­those who belong to the underside of modernity. This art can be called 20 “postethnic” in the sense that it strives to critically revisit and overcome 21 many recurrent ele­ments of the ethnic art of the 1990s, contemplating 22 ­these ele­ments through the prism of con­temporary global and local social 23 and po­liti­cal concerns. 24 25 Decolonial Art in Central Asia? 26 A telling example of decolonial art in Central Asia can be found in the 27 openly repressive country of Uzbekistan, which combines some elements­ 28 of Soviet-­style discipline and punishment with post-­Soviet, statist, ethnic 29 clan lawlessness. Contemporar­ y artists who criticize both Soviet and post-­ 30 Soviet national forms of unfreedom, and are aware of the traps of neolib- 31 eral globalization, are vulnerable in this environment. Post-­Soviet artists 32 are exposed to the pressure of commercialization and commodification 33 of their works and identities. But they are also not fr­ ee from state-­induced 34 ideological censorship. This is the situation in which the Uzbek artist, philos­ ­ 35 o­pher, poet, and cinematographer Vyacheslav Akhunov now finds himself. 36 Forbidden to leave Uzbekistan (which continues to use the Soviet system of 37 exit visas, and his is repeatedly denied), he has had to limit himself to hold- 38 ing low-key­ “apartment exhibitions” in his home country while his works

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 42 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 travel the world. A number of impor­tant museums and private collectors hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th have bought his art in the past two decades,­ and Akhunov has won several 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th impor­tant prizes at biennials and festivals. But in most cases he is not even 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th allowed to visit his own exhibition or collect the prize. This is the double 4 existence per se, which makes Akhunov’s life uncomfortable yet imbues 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th him with an additional perspective. This would be impossible, had he been 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th more integrated into the simulacrum of the local artistic world or had he 7 simply been a Western artist belonging to the sphere of sameness. 8 Blind Alley (2007), one of Akhunov’s most powerful­ video artworks, 9 captures a peculiar post-­Soviet despair that is echoed in works from sev- 10 eral other post-­socialist countries (e.g., in the Romanian artist Ciprian 11 Mureşan’s work Leap into the Void, ­after Three Seconds [2004]). Like many 12 other examples of Akhunov’s video art, Blind Alley was filmed in Tashkent’s 13 old city, where the artist resides. Several protagonists wander in the nar- 14 row, curved streets looking for a way out and always ending up in a blind 15 alley as a pervading symbol of con­temporary Uzbek life. 16 Akhunov plays on vari­ous myths, utilized by the new/old elites both in 17 Rus­sia and in Uzbekistan, placing them against the looming background of 18 the global coloniality, intermeshing the imperial/colonial past and the neo- 19 imperial/colonial pres­ent. Such is his series of collages based on counter-­ 20 discursive interpretations of the nineteenth ­century Rus­sian painter Vassily 21 Vereschagin’s militaristic Orientalist works. It includes The Doors of the New 22 Tamerlane (2005), in which one of the guards from Vereshchagin’s painting 23 is replaced with a modern uniformed Uzbek security officer. Akhunov thus 24 accentuates the immutability of a hierarchical power system that is hostile 25 to its subalterns and the con­temporary revival of the Timurid myth. 26 Another famous work by Vereshchagin that was reproduced in all Soviet 27 history textbooks and is still proudly exhibited at the Tretyakov Gallery 28 in Moscow is The Apotheosis of War (1871). With its stereo­ ­typical heap of 29 ­human skulls, it is often interpreted as the artist’s antimilitaristic state- 30 ment. In Akhunov’s version, the skulls are intact, but the surrounding des- 31 ert is adorned with large advertisements for Coca-­Cola and other staples 32 of popu­lar culture and signs of belonging to global modernity: a “peaceful” 33 consumerist conquest still leaves ­human skulls behind­ while the present­ 34 military leaders and dictators can be successful cap­i­tal­ists, building their 35 fortunes at the expense of the former ­owners of ­these skulls. 36 The last painting in this series, Return of the Forgotten Regiment, reflects 37 on the Rus­sian/Soviet empire’s relation to its former soldiers, and generally 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 43 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th to all citizens. It originates from Vereshchagin’s At the Fortress Walls: Let 2 Them Enter! (1871), a painting that celebrates the Rus­sian Army’s “coura- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 geous attack” on Samarkand, in which Vereshchagin himself took an active hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 part. Akhunov makes an almost imperceptible but power­ful replacement: hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 instead of the ruined Samarkand fortress wall, the regiment assaults a hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 crumbling Kremlin wall that turns out to be made of clay. Symbolically, the 7 forgotten regiment is paying back to the empire and taking revenge against 8 ­those in power who sacrificed the soldiers’ lives and then chose to abandon 9 the former loyal servants to perish in the ruins of empire. 10 11 What Does It Mean to Be “Kazakhian”? 12 Previously nomadic Kazakhstan, which was flooded with millions of Slavic 13 colonists in the Soviet years who successfully diluted the local population 14 and made ­today’s Kazakhstanian idea of nation a highly constructed one, is 15 an in­ter­est­ing case of emerging decolonial sensibilities. Some of them take 16 deliberately actionist forms, when artists exploit their over-­exaggerated 17 Asiatic features, making fun of demonizing Orientalist ideologies, still 18 widely spread both in the West, in Rus­sia, and in Central Asia itself. Thus, 19 Said Atabekov has worked on peculiar assemblages that fused and superim- 20 posed presumably “traditional” and eternal ethnic-national­ features with 21 bits and pieces of con­temporary real­ity—­often disturbing, threatening, 22 and violent. However, these­ intrusions of modernity/coloniality into his 23 characters’ lives are invariably made nonaggressive, softened and domesti- 24 cated to show that life goes on and easily swallows and reworks any alien 25 ele­ments, incorporating them into its system. In fact, it is the opposite of 26 the usual assimilation and appropriation of colonial others­ through which 27 the artist draws the attention to what was marginalized before. 28 Atabekov’s decolonial counter-­discourse can be exemplified by his most 29 well-­known and controversial work, The Son of the East (1995), He discovers­ 30 an unexpected complex visual symbolism in shanyrak—­a wooden ring 31 with a cross inside, used to hold together the frame of the yurt (traditional 32 ­Kazakh movable tent-­house10 By placing the naked figure of a teenage boy 33 on the cross, Atabekov combines the post-­dependence national symbol of 34 Kazakhstan with the Christian imagery of crucifixion. At another impor­ 35 tant layer of visual symbolism, the image of the teenage boy mocks the 36 ideal proportions of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man. In both contexts, 37 the humanity of the protagonist is negated as he is made into an empty 38 symbol of national or universalist humanist ideology.

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 44 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 fig. 2.1 Taus Makhacheva, Super Taus (Untitled 1). Dagestan, 2014. Viral video, 2.16, 14 color, sound. Courtesy of the artist. 15 16 In Atabekov’s Warrior’s Cradle (2007) and Holy ­Family (2001), the 17 ­handle of the cradle is a Kalashnikov gun; instead of a canopy the family­ 18 recycles an abandoned banner of the United Nations troops, while a group 19 of Kazakh ­women in traditional clothes drags a faulty UN car through the 20 steppe, using just a rope. This work somewhat rhymes with the Dagestani 21 artist Taus Makhacheva’s video artwork Super Taus (2014). Dressed in a tra- 22 ditional Avarian dress and head­scarf, she is travelling in an old car along the 23 unpaved mountain road, which is suddenly blocked by a huge stone. Three 24 male workmen are unable to remove it to facilitate the traffic. The artist eas- 25 ily and nonchalantly does their job by herself, as many of her ­women rela- 26 tives would actually do in their everyday lives. Such is her cunning play on 27 the folkloric and mass cultural superheroes, merging with ordinary people­ 28 from con­temporary real­ity (Makhacheva 2015). 29 The Kazakh artist Yerbossyn Meldibekov’s works combine postcolonial 30 and post-­socialist imagery and aesthetics, struggling to come to terms si­ 31 mul­ta­neously with Western and global tendencies. Playing on his own de- 32 monized identity, Meldibekov revisits his Central Asian roots to transform 33 himself into an Asian analogue of the paradigmatic barbarian. He becomes 34 an Oriental other who has fallen out of time. His works are irreducible 35 to the Western (and Rus­sian/Soviet) canon, and to the so-­called ethnic-­ 36 national and ethnographic art. They are based on a creative, ironic and 37 subversive reworking of all of ­these ele­ments instead. 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 45 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th A number of Meldibekov’s video-­documented per­for­mances are uni- 2 fied by the dystopian space of Pastan as a generalized image of demon- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 ized Central Asia, that is perceived as having fallen out of time. In the hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 name “Pastan” one hears echoes of the existing “Stans”—Uzbekistan,­ Af­ hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 ghan­i­stan, Kazakhstan—­but grotesquely exaggerated by Meldibekov’s pro- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 vocative and ironic stance, which rejects the prettifying tradition in the 7 interpretation of ethnic culture and opts instead for a bloodthirsty and 8 demonstrative type of exoticism. Many viewers in Rus­sia and the West 9 take this exoticism at face value, which allows them to rest peacefully with 10 their reconfirmed Orientalist stereo­ ­types, whereas Kazakh intellectuals 11 often react indignantly, accusing the artist of unpatriotic gestures. Both 12 groups remain blind to a significant gap between the artist’s self and his 13 often violent and ­bitter allegories of mute and dehumanized Central Asian 14 subjectivity, devoid of any dignity or desire for freedom. Hence, the char- 15 acters of Meldibekov’s series are sold in the market like cabbage in sacks; 16 live ­human heads stick out of piles of bricks or directly from the earth and 17 are left to die slowly in the sun. Although Meldibekov defines “Pastan” as 18 a message created out of disappointment with Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s re- 19 forms, its meaning is clearly more complex than the author’s original inten- 20 tion (Fomenko 2013), as it embraces the leitmotif of essential powerlessness 21 and dispensability of ­human lives, which overgrows the Central Asian local 22 context in the direction of global social real­ity, where colonialism is being 23 reborn as coloniality. 24 Meldibekov’s Gattamelata in the Hide of Genghis Khan (2006) is based in 25 a double critique of the Western canon and its neoco­ ­lo­nial Central Asian 26 incarnations, sharing the universal cult of militant authority and power. 27 The artist criticizes both the pervasive self-­Orientalization and derivative 28 post-­Soviet Eurocentrism of local Kazakh elites and superfluous and banal 29 interpretations of national/ethnic culture. He accentuates the absence, the 30 hiatus, and, ultimately, the unimportance of the military leader’s actual­ 31 identity—­whether that leader is Gattamelata, Genghis Khan, or Tamerlane. 32 This is expressed in Meldibekov’s taxidermic tendencies. In Gattamelata in 33 the Hide of Genghis Khan, as in many other works, he uses the preserved 34 parts of dead animals’ bodies—­this time, a ­horse’s legs with naturalistic 35 physiological details of bones and veins. These­ legs also symbolize power 36 and violence.­ The original “Gattamelata,” from which Meldibekov cop- 37 ied his postcolonial caricature, was a statue of the condottiere Erasmo 38 da Narni. It was erected in Padua, where Donatello immortalized him in

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 46 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 the first Re­nais­sance equestrian monument. This model was to be replicated hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th in all the equestrian monuments thereafter—­both in Eu­rope and ­today 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th in Central Asia as well. The capitals of Central Asian states have also acquired 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th such monuments in the last twenty-five­ years. The “heroes” they depict are 4 often obscure, or even completely in­ven­ted, historical personages brought 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th back from oblivion. They carry no real significance for con­temporary citizens 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th of ­these nations. ­These nomads lack ­faces—or, rather, they are equipped with 7 average Mongoloid features, resembling every­one and no one at the same time. 8 A similar misunderstanding on the part of Eurocentric critics takes 9 place in the case of the Buryat artist Zorikto Dorzhiev, a cunning trickster 10 who makes fun of unsuspecting audiences’ assumptions that a savage from 11 the Far Eastern steppe can make only ­simple objects with ­little aesthetic 12 value. This artist regards the nomadic world of his contemplating characters 13 not as much as a real physical material place, but as an infinite and flex- 14 ible existential and metaphysical space, combining the personal and the 15 cosmic. This decolonial Buddhist with a solid formal academic art educa- 16 tion, which he soon rejected for being too Eurocentric, offers a virtuoso 17 canonical counter-­discourse of the most famous Western artworks, leaving 18 no stone untouched in the department of classical aesthetics. Such is his 19 Gioconda Khatun (2007), in which the standard of Euro­ ­pean beauty trans- 20 mutes into a Buryat ­woman. Yet, a Caliban, painting an ironic Miranda’s 21 portrait to make her look like his mother­ Sycorax, can never be accepted 22 into Prospero’s reference system. A similar technique of repainting West- 23 ern masterpieces, making their characters look decidedly Mongoloid and 24 supplying them with Kazakh-­sounding names, is used by Kuanysh Bazarg- 25 aliev in his proj­ect When Every­one Was Kazakhian (2013). 26 The Kazakh woman­ artist Saule Suleimenova superimposes archival 27 and con­temporary photographs­ and painting in her multi-­temporal and 28 multi-­spatial series I Am Kazakh. She carefully releases the forgotten and 29 suppressed impulses and sensations of the beautiful, attempting to “recon- 30 nect and reconcile traditional Kazakh culture and the aesthetics of revolt, 31 modernist artistic devices, the pathos of eternity, and the poetics of the 32 everyday.” 11 Suleimenova keeps coming back to per­sis­tent inferiority com- 33 plexes, which are typical in con­temporary Kazakhstan, where thinking and 34 perception are still marked by coloniality: “Our people­ desperately want 35 to look better. They are very much afraid that someone ­will think badly 36 of them.” 12 Suleimenova urges her compatriots to unlearn ­others’ artificial 37 ideas of the beautiful and sublime—­Western and local—that­ ­were taught to 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 47 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 fig. 2.2 Saule Suleimenova, Cow Apa. 2016. Acrylic in giclée print on canvas, 127 cm × 180 cm. From the series AstanaLine. Courtesy of the artist. 18 19 20 21 them as universal and natural.­ She is thus attempting to decolonize their 22 idea of Kazakhness. Similarly to Meldibekov, Suleimenova was initially ac- 23 cused of taking an unpatriotic stance and disgracing the image of Kazakhstan 24 in her works, which superimpose Kazakh ­faces from nineteenth-­century 25 photo­graphs on the contemporar­ y ragged walls of Almaty and rundown 26 garages inscribed with endless advertisements. But this decolonial inoc- 27 ulation, shocking at first, is already producing results as more and more 28 Kazakhs turn to Suleimenova’s works as powerful­ aids for unconventional 29 self-­reflection and critical thinking at the crossroads of rationality and affect. 30 In I am Kazakh and in her recent series Cellophane Painting, where Su- 31 leimenova turns garbage (the used plastic bags) into art, she re­creates a 32 more complex and contradictory idea of real­ity than any official binary ide- 33 ology is able to offer. She says, that contemporar­ y Kazakh real­ity is “awful 34 and beautiful at once” (2010) and people­ must learn how to deal with it 35 and how to appreciate this complexity, this symphonic nature of life. Art 36 in its turn should not take this reality­ to flat and rozenf images and stere­ o­ 37 types, to rosy prettiness or stylized archaism. In this respect­ Cellophane Paint- 38 ing is also a play on ethnic-­national archetypes and ste­reo­types. The artist

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 48 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 fig. 2.3 Saule Suleimenova, Notarial Office. 2015. Acrylic on giclée print on canvas, 17 127 cm × 180 cm. From the series AstanaLine. Courtesy of the artist. 18 19 links them to a more global ecological dimension and a reflection on colonial 20 forms of consumer society and second-­rate modernity. The “paintings” in 21 question are in real­ity made of recycled plastic bags of dif­fer­ent colors. They 22 often depict the primordial Kazakh steppe, which the staunch patriots ven- 23 erate so much, yet continue to pollute with ­these very plastic bags, left over 24 from their happy consumer purchases, to the point that the blooming steppe 25 becomes invisible under­ the plastic garbage cover. Suleimenova does not 26 avoid the overtly politi­ ­cal themes either.­ Thus in Zhanaozen (2014) she pre- 27 sented the tabooed story of the massacre in the oil town Zhanaozen, when 28 fourteen ­people protesting against the regime, wer­ e killed by the police on 29 the country’s In­de­pen­dence Day, and many ­were imprisoned (Ames 2011). 30 31 32 The Babylonian Caucasus and the Decolonial Aesthesis 33 Ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity in the Caucasus, as well as the re- 34 gion’s complex imperial-­colonial histories, do not prevent it from keeping 35 a pan-­Caucasian community of sense and a shared decolonial subjectivity 36 that is expressed in multiple forms in a number of works created by artists 37 from the region. For instance, Azerbaijani authors problematize vari­ous 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 49 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th kinds of modernities imposed on their open and changeable identity, al- 2 ways escaping any stiff prescribed forms. In his multilingual visual poetry, hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 Babi Badalov mixes Latin and Cyrillic alphabets in an effort to make sense hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 of his own diasporic queer existence in Eu­rope. Orhan Guseynov’s Non-­ hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 Standard (2006) celebrates the fact that Azerbaijani culture refuses to fit hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 into Western norms, even in such simple­ ­matters as sticking chureks (a 7 kind of handmade cornbread) into an electric toaster. The Dagestani art- 8 ist Magomed Dibirov’s soup (2006) follows in this direction, showing the 9 unhappy face of his niece as she refuses to eat a replica of Andy Warhol’s 10 mass-­produced tomato soup. 11 Generally the Northern Caucasus artists are less openly decolonial as 12 they still remain within the Rus­sian Federation and must be more care- 13 ful in their self-­censorship and less open to any dialogues with Euro­ ­pean 14 countries or much less with the Muslim world at large. Dibirov is a good 15 example of such an Aesopian language. A native of Khasavyurt—a­ town at 16 the border of Chechnya and Dagestan, the artist encrypts his politi­ ­cal ideas 17 in physically palpable material meta­phors and often deliberately inanimate 18 objects. Such a politi­ ­cal still life is his Member of the Federation, where Russi­ a 19 is depicted as a brick wall in which one loose brick stands for Dagestan. An- 20 other example is Temporary Truce, featuring a meat grinder as an obvious 21 symbol of power and a lonely tomato whose destiny is way too clear. In Se- 22 curity Ser­vice, Dibirov addresses Islamophobia through an expressive image 23 of a beautiful arch, behind­ which lies the wonderful modern world and its 24 guardian—­a gigantic safety razor. The razor is awaiting the bearded Muslim 25 protagonist (the beard ­here is a symbol of Muslim identity) as a necessary 26 and inescapable condition of his integration into Western society. 27 28 “Super Taus” and Other Creatures 29 Another inter­ ­est­ing example of emerging decolonial sensibility and aes- 30 thesis in the northern Caucasus can be found in Taus Makhacheva’s per­ 31 for­mances, installations, and video art. One of the most successful young 32 post-­Soviet artists of non-­Russian ethnic-­national origins, Makhacheva 33 has skyrocketed to international fame. She cannot be taken to represent 34 merely Dagestani identity, yet at the same time she does not fit the neo-­ 35 universalist globalist model favored by international contemporar­ y art 36 gurus. Makhacheva grew up in Moscow, earned her master’s degree in Lon- 37 don, and now divides her time among Dagestan; Moscow; and art residen- 38 cies in Eu­rope, Asia, and Amer­i­ca. Yet this trajectory does not make her an

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 50 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 altermodern artist à la Bourriaud. Her critical cosmopolitanism does not hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th prevent her from maintaining strong links with the Caucasus. At the same 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th time, she always keeps an ironic distance from this culture, to which she 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th still partly feels she belongs. In this re­spect, Makhacheva often acts as a 4 self-­reflexive anthropologist-­cum-­artist, striving to better understand con­ 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th temporary culture and the social and politi­ ­cal real­ity of Dagestan, which 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th is constantly torn between the modernizing and Westernizing tendencies, 7 stylized Islamic models, pale remnants of the Soviet modernity, and persis­ ­ 8 tent local indigenous traditions. 9 Even Makhacheva’s earliest video works could be regarded as cases of 10 ­decolonial aesthesis. For example, such was her per­for­mance Carpet (2006) 11 in which she slowly wrapped and unwrapped herself into and out of a tra- 12 ditional carpet kilim, typical of Persia, the ­Middle East, Central Asia and 13 the Caucasus. Her video is not exoticizing the carpets or celebrating carpet 14 making as a traditional craft. Rather, it is a document of her struggling to 15 come to terms and stay in touch with her own culture. Makhacheva per- 16 forms this task through an extremely corporeal sensation, rediscovering 17 traces of communal memory of other Caucasus women’­ s bodies, wrapped 18 and unwrapped into carpets to be kidnapped into forced marriages or sold 19 into slavery. But in Makhacheva’s case, wrapping herself into a carpet be- 20 comes a decolonial gesture of bodily reunification with the forgotten native 21 sounds, smells, surfaces, textures, and tastes. The video re­creates an almost 22 palpable sense of the old rough carpet on the human­ skin. The artist relives 23 ­these personal and collective embodied memories, using an old carpet as 24 a decolonial tool, which is far from being a detached object of decorative 25 applied arts, but rather acts as an almost living subject. 26 In the next de­cade, Makhacheva created several decolonial projects,­ 27 including Delinking (2011), which interprets this concept in a peculiar 28 body-­graphic way. The artist wanted to embody the idea of delinking “from 29 Eu­ro­pean thinking and ways of receiving knowledge, ­because in all cultures 30 ­there are completely dif­fer­ent systems for [and] practices of transmitting 31 knowledge, cultural and intellectual evolution. [But] the world uses only 32 the sanctified Western academic system” (Makhacheva 2011). InDelink - 33 ing, Makhacheva’s face is painted with Indian, African, and ­Middle Eastern 34 ornaments. This kind of henna body art is used in vari­ous rituals on hands 35 and legs but never on the face. As soon as her whole­ face was covered with 36 ornaments, the spaces where the skin was still vis­i­ble ­were filled with more 37 henna, so that in the end her visage was totally covered with green mass. 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 51 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ­After it got dry and was washed off, the face changed its color and became 2 orange-­brownish. It stayed so for about a week as a new mask, a new mock- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 ing identity, leaving a trace. The changing face color, thus became a space hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 for multi-­spatial overlay of dif­fer­ent cultural and epistemic systems. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 Another decolonial gesture that emerges in several of Makhacheva’s hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 works refers to her play with space and spatial histories, which are al- 7 ways connected with bodies and embodiment. In Gamsutl (2012), she con- 8 templates how ­human beings communicate with space, both natu­ral and 9 man-­made, and with social and historical dimensions of spatiality through 10 rediscovering and reliving in an utmost bodily sense, vari­ous forgotten and 11 discarded spaces. The ruins of the abandoned village Gamsutl merge with 12 the natu­ral rocky landscape around. They imperceptibly blend with the 13 cliffs, as the natu­ral guardians, fi­nally claiming this space back from the 14 ­humans, who did not cope with making a livable and sustainable space 15 on the top of the mountain. The per­for­mance centers on a ritual of remem- 16 bering and reenactment of the spatial memory and embodied merging with 17 this multilayered space, which witnessed the Russo-­Caucasus War, Soviet 18 modernity, and post-Soviet­ abandonment and return to nature. The protago- 19 nist of the video is a young man who is trying on various­ identities, imagines 20 himself as a defender of Gamsutl, an assaulter, a warrior and citizen, and a 21 brigade leader at a Soviet collective farm, merging traditional dance with 22 symbols of Soviet modernity. Finally,­ he is just a human­ who is striving to 23 understand what it means to be a tombstone, a watchtower, a crack in the 24 dilapidated wall. 25 The close connections between spaces and bodies stand in the center of 26 Makhacheva’s attention in other works, as well. In Landscape (2013), she 27 plays on the fact that, in the Avarian language, the word for “mountains” and 28 “noses” is the same by presenting an installation of wooden copies of the real 29 noses of Caucasus inhabitants, who traditionally are known for their large 30 and prominent noses. She arranges the wooden copies in such a way that 31 the installation becomes a replica of the Caucasus mountain range, made of 32 the ­human noses, thus accentuating the bodily dimensions of the Avarian 33 identity and humorously, their close connections with the environment. 34 A more openly po­liti­cal and disturbing dimension enters Makhacheva’s 35 experiments with space and corporeality in Caspian Sea (2014), first pre- 36 sented at the Uppsala Konstmuseum in Sweden. For the opening of the 37 Friction Festival for perfor­ ­mance art, Makhacheva prepared a geograph­ ­ 38 i­cal cake in the form of the real landscape around the Caspian Sea. She

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 52 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Fig. 2.4 Taus Makhacheva, Landscape. 2013–­pres­ent. Series of objects, wood, 16 ­dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. 17 18 19 was cutting the cake and distributing its pieces among the guests at the 20 opening of the festival. The artist here­ literally embodied the meta­phor of 21 annexation as devouring and consuming countries and territories, which 22 unfortunately is becoming a habitual practice once again. An obvious par- 23 allel to this gastronomic repre­sen­ta­tion of aggressive geopolitics is the war 24 in Ukraine. It is being distorted by propaganda of all the interested sides, 25 which is also symbolically force-feeding­ the audiences with its indigestible 26 dishes. An additional uneasy accent of this work is its historical parallelism. 27 As in many other projects,­ Makhacheva first works with forgotten archival 28 materials, which she studies at the State Documentary Archive in Krasno- 29 gorsk. There­ she discovered a documentary chronicle—­one of the favorite 30 Soviet genres of World War 2 period, in which a cake in the shape of the 31 Caspian region was presented to Adolf Hitler by his generals. The artist is 32 skeptical about the authenticity of this chronicle, as there­ is not a single 33 episode where Hitler and the cake would share the same frame. But even if 34 this ­were a montage, it does not negate the obvious parallel between recent 35 geopo­liti­cal events and World War II history. 36 The most wide-scale­ expression of decolonial drives in Makhacheva’s 37 works is presented in her projects­ focusing on the decolonization of 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 53 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 fig. 2.5 Taus Makhacheva, Caspian Sea. 2014. Photo documentation of the 17 ­per­for­mance Cake. Courtesy of the artist. 18 19 20 ­museums. This trend is getting popularity all over the world, finding its 21 realization in vari­ous museum interventions. They problematize the affec- 22 tive and conceptual operations, lying in the basis of the creation, apprecia- 23 tion and interaction with art and questioning the essentialist approaches, 24 which ­were naturalized in the museum exhibitions before, through view- 25 ing “the established beliefs and institutions of our modern heritage as not 26 only real but true, and not only true but good” (Curtis 2012, 74). These­ inter- 27 ventions are questioning the institutional framing of art and the linear pro- 28 gressivist narrative that museums continue to promote, thus problematiz- 29 ing the bound­aries between repre­sen­ta­tion and appropriation. As a result, 30 a major epistemic and optical shift is enacted in a deliberate reversal of 31 the roles of the audience and the objects it contemplates. Françoise Lion- 32 net (2012, 192) cites the example of a Native American museum in which 33 “exhibitions have been designed and controlled by those­ whose culture is 34 on display. . . . ​Then the objects appear to be observing the spectators who 35 become objectified by the masks whose eyes seem to be following their 36 movements. In this case the exhibition builds a flexible, dynamic relation- 37 ship with the culture is seeks to represent, and at the same time—­with the 38 viewer—­neither of whom is entombed or simply reflected but put into a

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 54 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 problematic dialogue instead.” The exhibition “A Museum Looks at Itself,” hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York in 1992, provided 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th another in­ter­est­ing example of a critical, self-reflexive­ approach problema- 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th tizing the imperialist and racist ideologies in the basis of this museum’s 4 princi­ples of repre­sen­ta­tion and se­lection. 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Decolonial artists combine the roles of artists and curators by critically 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th engaging permanent collections, the spatial and temporal structures of ex- 7 isting museums, and the ways ­those museums stage their interaction with 8 the audiences. Often, decolonization of the museum takes the form of hid- 9 den or camouflaged interventions, grounded in deliberately accentuating of 10 the ele­ments of “tradition” as seen through a certain critical perspective—for­ 11 instance, by presenting artifacts of a nonmodern culture alongside conceptual 12 video art or per­for­mances by con­temporary authors who are connected with 13 that culture. Widely known examples of decolonial museum interventions 14 include Fred Wilson’s site-specific­ installations Mining“ the Museum” 15 (Mary­land Historical Society, 1993) and “The Museum: Mixed Meta­phors” 16 (Seattle Art Museum, 1993). Wilson (1993: 101) is “interested in bringing 17 historical information to the aesthetic experience in order to reveal the 18 imperialist real­ity of how museums obtain or interpret the objects they 19 display. ­Doing so makes clear the complexity of ­things on display.” 20 Makhacheva has also contributed to the decolonization of the museum 21 in several of her recent proj­ects. The disciplining role of the museum as an 22 imperial or national institution that provides a single, legitimized histori- 23 cal or aesthetic truth in a popu­lar form is problematized in her small-scale­ 24 work The Way of an Object (2013), based on the collection of the Dages- 25 tan Museum of Fine Arts. In this work, the artist plays with a number of 26 museum objects, putting them in unfamiliar contexts outside the museum, 27 such as at the entrance to the State Puppet Theater, where this per­for­mance 28 first took place. This peculiar delocalizing, or “de-­museumizing,” was done 29 to give voices back to objects that have been mute; to represent talking 30 museum objects acting as characters in a puppet theater play written spe- 31 cifically for this work. The characters are an Avarian salt box; a Kubachi 32 wedding bracelet; and the painting The Bird Gamayun (1895), by Victor Vas- 33 netsov. In their endless arguments, Makhacheva rethinks the idea of narrat- 34 ing multiple histories in relation to a museum exhibition. 35 Giving mute and muted objects the right, and ability, to speak again is 36 one of the more widespread approaches in the decolonization of museums. 37 Often the main focus shifts from the (material) collection to a narrative, 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 55 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 fig. 2.6 Taus hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 Makhacheva, The hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 Way of an Object. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2013. Set of three 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th marionettes, mixed 5 media, dimensions hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 variable. Courtesy 7 of the artist. 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 which a curator builds around a set of objects—or in spite of them—or 28 even in the mode of objectless storytelling (Spalding 2002, 55). We find 29 something similar in The Way of an Object: when placed in a traditional 30 museum, the artifacts of Dagestani culture are torn from their context and 31 divorced from their sociocultural, utilitarian, and cosmological functions 32 and abilities. Vasnetsov’s painting is also taken out of its original milieu and 33 becomes a dead repre­sen­ta­tion of someone ­else’s impenetrable canon. The 34 Bird Gamayun was taken to Dagestan to educate the local ­people according 35 to Western/Rus­sian aesthetic norms; it carries a colonialist agenda that is 36 verbalized in the painting’s lines in Makhacheva’s perfor­ ­mance. The piece 37 is, in fact, a museum intervention that is taken out of the museum and 38 placed right in the street.

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 56 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 fig. 2.7 Taus Makhacheva, Tightrope. Dagestan, 2015. 4Kvideo/73.03, color, sound. 14 Courtesy of the artist. 15 16 Makhacheva has continued her decolonization of the museum and 17 problematizing of art and artists in a more recent and larger proj­ect that 18 combines perfor­ ­mances and video art. At the Sixth Moscow Biennial of 19 Con­temporary Art in 2015, her work took the central place in the main 20 pavilion and was presented in two forms: as an original videotaped per­ 21 for­mance called Tightrope (2015) and its Moscow version, which became a 22 more ironic and meta­phorical show titled On the Importance of Pyramids, in 23 the Cultural Perception, on the Strengthening of National Consciousness and the 24 Shaping of the Moral and Ethical Landmarks. The title rings a bell both with 25 audiences who remember Soviet-­style multiculturalism and with ­those 26 who witness its new edition in the revival of moth-­eaten imperial symbols 27 and jargon. An impor­tant detail is that this per­for­mance was site-­specific: it 28 was staged at the heart of the Soviet VDNKh (Vystavka Dostizheniy Narod- 29 nogo Khozyaystva/Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy) 30 complex, which used to be the epitome of official multiculturalism and 31 Soviet progressivism. This added ironic overtones of its own. 32 Like many of Makhacheva’s works, Tightrope grew out of a concrete 33 situation: the local museum of applied arts was provided with a better and 34 larger building by the Dagestanian government. However, the museum 35 staff was asked to move all its collections in one day. Consequently the 36 moving took dramatic and grotesque forms, when the ancient carpets wer­ e 37 simply thrown out of the windows­ into the street to facilitate the moving 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 57 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th pro­cess. ­People from the neighboring ­houses assumed that the museum 2 was being closed and its collections ­were stolen or destroyed. But Makh- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 acheva’s work is ultimately not about the precariousness of museums as in- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 stitutions and their difficult relations with power. The main metaphor­ used hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 in this proj­ect—­that of a tightrope walker taking the paintings, one by one hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 from one mountain to another, evokes associations with the fragility of art 7 as such in the face of the changing times, and also with ­human responsibil- 8 ity for preserving this art. Importantly, it is not just any art, but a history 9 of Dagestanian twentieth century­ painting and its complex relations with 10 modernity. The artist contemplates the links and intersections between 11 the so called academic and traditional art, which used to be considered a 12 mere craft before and at times even ­today. 13 It is significant that inTightrope , the paintings, which are copies of the 14 sixty-­plus main works of Dagestani fine art, are carried across the abyss 15 by the local master of tightrope walking Rasul Abakarov whose ­family has 16 been rope walking for five generations. This is clearly not an academic, but 17 an indigenous and popu­lar kind of art, as in the case of the puppet theater 18 in the previous project—­ ­a craft which has existed for centuries and is still 19 alive. But Makhacheva goes further and gives the rope-­walker a strange 20 balance—­the problematic canvases of Dagestanian artists who, due to the 21 Soviet modernization, wer­ e educated in the classical academic tradition and 22 learned to paint in the Rus­sian and Soviet (mostly realistic) style, thus fusing 23 the ethnic-­national subjects with essentially Western (though camouflaged 24 as Soviet) aesthetic forms and norms. However the rope walker does not 25 discard ­these obviously secondary and imitative works. He carries them care- 26 fully from one mountain to another. He is not a Caliban rejecting Prospero’s 27 education, then, but a balancing negotiator who is always on the edge, always 28 at the border. This is also a fitting description of Makhacheva’s work. 29 In Tightrope Makhacheva problematizes models of appreciating and 30 transmitting the history of twentieth-­century Dagestani painting and 31 graphics, contemplating ­whether and how this art can become recogniz- 32 able in a wider context. The video documentation of ­these perfor­ ­mances was 33 immediately acquired by the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, The Nether- 34 lands, and Belgium’s Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (Antwerp 35 Museum of Con­temporary Art), for their permanent collections. And this is 36 in itself a way of making Dagestanian artists (both con­temporary, like Taus 37 Makhacheva, and the forgotten ones, the copies of whose work are carried 38 across) vis­i­ble and known in the world. Makhacheva draws our attention

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 58 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 to how complex and unpredictable are both the creative process­ and its le- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th gitimation. She sees artists as taking a risk with ­every new proj­ect, just as 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th a tightrope walker does with each new trip across the abyss. But she also 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th reflects on the importance of the custodians and keepers of continuity, who 4 are skillful acrobats, risking their lives for the art’s sake. It is a musing on the 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th complexity of the ways of transferring the ethnic-national­ cultural traditions 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and the precariousness of artists and their work. Its results are never known 7 in advance—we cannot know if success or failure awaits us as creators, and 8 many ingenious works never find their way into museums, collections, and 9 cultural memory, figuratively falling into the abyss of oblivion. 10 The museum in Makhacheva’s Tightrope is the opposite of the notorious 11 white cube. It is rather presented through the two destination points linked 12 by the rope. The first is a semblance of a bicycle parking-stand,­ in which the 13 paintings are located so close to each other in the racks, that they are almost 14 breathing in each other’s backs. The second is a metal cage, in which the 15 canvases have a ­little more space, as in a real museum storage. It manifests 16 the idea of a movable museum, which has attracted Makhacheva for a long 17 time. What I find liberating in this work is that art in its precarious and 18 vulnerable situation of being balanced by a rope walker over the abyss, is 19 paradoxically much more living, breathing and ­free, than when it is placed 20 in the dusty halls of any traditional museum. At this point the paintings 21 suddenly become part of the decanonized pres­ent, not yet or no more in 22 the museum. This invigorating affective moment of reviving the art through 23 a tight-­rope walking experience, was reproduced at the Moscow Biennial, 24 where instead of the missing real mountains Makhacheva constructed the 25 ­imagined ones—­the pyramids which wer­ e made out of the acrobats’ bodies. 26 The young athletes proceeded to do the same job as Abakarov did before—­ 27 carefully, one by one they carried all the sixty one paintings from the bicycle 28 stand to the metal storage on the other side of the hall. 29 30 A Caucasus Midnight Child 31 The Chechen Aslan Gaisumov is another example of a young artist from the 32 Caucasus who has quickly gained international fame. Many of his works tell 33 about the war, which has affected his life from its start, as Gaisumov spent 34 his childhood in a refugee camp in Ingushetia. Yet he finds unusual and in- 35 direct ways to tell the war narratives, avoiding both sensationalism and the 36 documentary dryness of official military reports. His view is never that of any 37 fighting side; rather, it is of the ordinarypeople­ who find themselves in the 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 59 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 fig. 2.8 Aslan Gaisumov, No Need for Theories. 2011. Mixed Media (book, soil), 17 7.5 cm × 12 cm × 26 cm. From the series Untitled (War). Courtesy of the artist and Zink 18 Gallery, Berlin. 19 20 21 midst of war against their ­will. One of his best-­known works, the series Un- 22 titled (War) (2013), consists of books that all bear traces of war. The books act 23 in unusual and unnatural functions. They are witnesses, victims, and even 24 accomplices of the war crimes. The books may be used to make fires to warm 25 up the ­children, but they may also contain clockwork bombs and be intended 26 to kill and not to educate. In Gaisumov’s works stark meta­phors often reveal 27 their scary real side—in this case, it is the books that normally represent 28 every­thing that is opposed to war, such as ­human culture, intellect, knowl- 29 edge, and poetry. Yet at the same time, the books are not just repre­sen­ta­tions; 30 they are real traces of ­human lives continuing in spite of the war. 31 The same shifting and liquid border between stark meta­phor and cruel 32 real­ity is at the center of Gaisumov’s Volga (2015), which may look like 33 a grotesque exaggeration of the penchant for extended families typical for 34 the natives of the Caucasus and a play on the stereo­ ­typical Rus­sian fear of 35 ­these clans invading Moscow. If its characters wer­ e ­going to the market or 36 just to visit relatives in the village, even wer­ e moving to Moscow in quest of 37 a better life, the piece would have been merely a funny video of twenty-plus­ 38 ­people slowly disappearing, in contradiction to all physical laws, into an old

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 60 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 Soviet Volga car. But the point of decolonial catharsis ­here is that it all ­really hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th happened. When Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, was bombed by the Rus­ 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th sian Army, Aslan’s ­family first deci­ded to hide in their native village in the 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th mountains. To save as many ­people as pos­si­ble, they ­really gathered and fit 4 twenty-­six relatives into a single Volga. Reflecting on this eventtoday­ , Gaisu- 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th mov realizes that the situation looks like a slapstick comedy. Yet it is tragic, as 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th well, if we look at it from the time perspective of twenty years later­ and with 7 an awareness of all of the ruined lives, deaths and losses, new beginnings and 8 vanished hopes. The decolonial optic in this work hides precisely in this tem- 9 poral lag, in the appreciation of what happened after­ the characters got into 10 the Volga. Yet the video is not negative; it is full of humor and self-­irony. It 11 celebrates the ­peoples’ ability to see the lighter and funnier side of any cheer- 12 less event—an ability that helps them to survive and prevail in any situation 13 that is obviously the case of Chechnya and its long-­suffering ­people. 14 Nevertheless, Gaisumov realizes that the cataclysms of recent history, 15 the many layers of colonization, repression, destruction, exile, have been 16 hard on the Chechen culture, making it at times almost impossible for it to 17 survive. In a number of his works, the artist reflects on the ways of this sur- 18 vival in utmost situations, when completely dif­fer­ent experiences and out- 19 looks make generation gaps hard to breach. Each generation of Chechens 20 has its own memory and its own version of history. Older ­people remem- 21 ber Stalin’s deportations; the generation born immediately afterward, how- 22 ever, is ­free from that trauma and tends to idealize the Soviet Chechnya of 23 the 1960s and 1970s. Gaisumov’s peers grew up in tents and basements, 24 hiding from the army’s attacks and bombing; the younger generation of 25 Chechens may not know what Grozny looked like before it was rebuilt by 26 Ramzan Kadyrov as a shameless replica of the United Arab Emirates. What 27 makes all ­these ­people Chechens, if anything? the artist seems to ask. 28 In fact, in one of our many long conversations over Skype, Gaisumov 29 went even deeper, questioning the pervasive local patriotic pride of Grozny 30 and thus moving to the previous layer of colonial history and problematiz- 31 ing the collective memory. What is Chechnya’s capital, Grozny (lit., “fear- 32 some” in Rus­sian), ­after all, if not a military fort in the Caucasus redoubt 33 line, built to “protect” invading tsarist Rus­sian troops from the “attacks” 34 of the unconquered local ­people and ­later made into the capital of one of 35 the Soviet “autonomous” republics under­ total Russian­ control. Grozny 36 was mostly reserved for the Russian/Soviet­ settler colonists; no locals wer­ e 37 even allowed to live ­there ­until the last de­cades of the twentieth ­century. 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 61 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 fig. 2.9 Aslan Gaisumov, Untitled. 2015. Mixed media: one original Chechen water­ 17 jug from the nineteenth ­century; six glass copies of the national Chechen ­water jugs. 18 Courtesy of the artist and Zink Gallery, Berlin. 19 20 Gaisumov, like Makhacheva, acts as a participative anthropologist in 21 dialogue with the audience’s aesthesis, evoking bodily memories, sensuous 22 responses, and erased and forgotten historical realities. In Untitled (2015), 23 he uses Murano glass in the form of the traditional metal jugs ­women used 24 to carry water­ in Chechen villages in the past—that­ is, when people­ ­were 25 not thinking of only physical survival and wer­ e not forced into a permanent 26 state of exception, making them forget about unimportant things­ such as 27 the crafts and traditions that ­were slipping into oblivion. Gaisumov’s jugs 28 are made of the transparent Murano glass and are devoid of any utilitarian 29 purposes. Rather, he offers an embodied vision of an ex-­colonial ethnic 30 culture. It is a reflection on temporality, on the whimsies and manipula- 31 tions of memory and the difficulties of recovering the communal object in 32 the world of commodities. Gaisumov strives to detect, in what elusive and 33 escaping images, objects, memories and sensations a culture continues to 34 live, when it is constantly uprooted, exiled, destroyed and remodeled. His 35 jars are an attempt to represent such an embodied memory as the only 36 remaining way of preserving the cultural constants for the future­ genera- 37 tions. The jars are transparent, clear and lucid structures, which can be 38 ­later filled with any meaning by each new generation.

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 62 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 fig. 2.10 Aslan Gaisumov, analogue black-­and-­white photo­graph for the proj­ect 19 ­People of No Consequence. 2016. Courtesy of the artist. 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 fig. 2.11 Aslan Gaisumov, analogue black-­and-­white photo­graph for the proj­ect ­People of No Consequence. 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 63 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Gaisumov believes that culture is not stagnant. It is not waiting for the 2 return of its exiles, which makes us all potential strangers in our native hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 lands. Any attempt to revive original traditions turns out to be false. Gaisu- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 mov explained to me that his idea to make the glass jugs was prompted by hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 ancient vessels that are put together from remaining bits and pieces and hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 then exhibited in museums. In many cases, the missing parts are replaced 7 with glass elements.­ In the case of Chechen culture, almost everything­ 8 is missing; therefore, making a metaphor­ of this culture as a glass jug a 9 power­ful, if indirect, way to admit that the tradition is gone, that ­there are 10 no au­then­tic parts left. ­Today such jugs risk becoming dysfunctional ob- 11 jects that do not fit into any culture.Ther­ e is no brook left to which women­ 12 can go to get ­water. ­There are no ­people who can tell us who owned the 13 jugs just by looking at their shapes and ornaments. The meaning of such 14 actions has been lost forever. Yet, as in the case of Volga, Gaisumov does not 15 see this as a tragedy. For him, a culture that is always on the road can find 16 new forms of survival. The jugs are empty and waiting for new generations 17 to fill them with their own meanings. 18 Decolonial aesthesis in the former Soviet Union acquires dif­fer­ent, often 19 unexpected forms that merge and juxtapose the postcolonial, post-­socialist, 20 global neoliberal, national fundamentalist, neo-imperial­ and several other 21 dimensions. Yet in each of the analyzed cases, the artists try to put together 22 a complex and multilayered picture of the post-Soviet­ ­human condition 23 and reflect on the pres­ent and ­future of the ­people living in this world. 24 They do this from the position of critical border detachment that allows 25 for successful de-automatizing­ of aesthetic principles­ and is often linked to 26 efforts to accentuate the suppressed elements­ of aesthesis. As a result, such 27 works have broken through to a set of refreshing decolonial affects. This 28 urge is carefully kept away from any dogmatic interpretations and seen 29 instead as a flexible, live, and shifting field of social, cultural, artistic, and 30 existential creativity. 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 64 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 CHAPTER THREE 12 13 14 15 A ­Woman Who Has 16 Many Selves and Takes Over Many Spaces 17 18 A Conversation with Liina Siib 19 20 21 Liina Siib is one of the leading Estonian visual artists, feminist thinkers, 22 curators and activists who represented Estonia at the 54th Venice Biennale 23 with her photographic proj­ect A ­Woman Takes ­Little Space, exhibited at Pala- 24 zzo Malipiero in 2011. Interviewing Liina was quite in­ter­est­ing for me as we 25 belong to the same generation and also share the post-Soviet­ sensibility. The 26 latter is true in spite of impor­tant differences in our experience and descent, 27 in spite of the fact that, in my life, the postcolonial ele­ment prevails. Siib is 28 connected with Estonia, which for many centuries has under­gone a num- 29 ber of direct and indirect colonizations and assimilations, by both the more 30 power­ful Western Eu­ro­pean states and also the subaltern Russian­ empire 31 and, ­later the USSR marked by the imperial difference. This shared Soviet 32 experience still holds our common hermeneutical horizon together and 33 allows for numerous critical conceptualizations and reflections. 34 The second node of our affective communication is feminist solidarity, 35 which is also marked by the postsocialist condition. Positionalities such as 36 Siib’s are crucial for any efforts to conceptualize the nature of imperial differ- 37 ence and the paradoxical forms of colonial difference it generates in the cases 38

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 65 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 fig. 3.1 Liina Siib, A ­Woman Takes ­Little Space. Ongoing series since 2007. Digitally 17 edited analogue color photography, pigmented ink print, 30 cm × 45 cm. Courtesy of 18 the artist. 19 20 21 when the “colonies” initially are more successful in their economic, social 22 and cultural development than the metropolis. Toda­ y’s belated and ultimately 23 failed return of ­these countries to the Eu­ro­pean bosom has exposed the older 24 and never properly critically assessed layers of the Baltic identity connected 25 with internal Eu­ro­pean colonization and the forceful transformation into 26 “second-­rate” Eu­ro­pe­ans who are once again put into the state of dependence 27 and forever catching up the neoliberal global modernity/coloniality. 28 madina tlostanova: Having seen several of your projects,­ I have an 29 impression that space and spatial history are impor­tant categories in 30 your work. I would like to ask you about your own perception of space 31 (maybe in relation to time), home and “unhomeleness” to use Homi 32 Bhabha’s famous definition for “ the condition of extra-­territorial and 33 cross-­cultural initiations” (Bhabha 1994, 9); the spaces of freedom and 34 constraint, space and/as corporality, especially gendered corporality, in 35 the context of the East Eu­ro­pean postsocialist local history? 36 37 liina siib: It seems to be so. Indeed, I see and experience the world 38 around me through places and spaces. Space can be perceived as a

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 66 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 substance where all sorts of things­ can happen in which human­ be- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ings are involved. It means how ordinary ­people act and operate in 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th dif­fer­ent spaces, ideologies and systems, how do they find mecha- 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th nisms of re­sis­tance. What can we do with the space, indoors and out- 4 doors, what space is left for women?­ Or what has come through the 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th history of a place that has been intriguing, pointing at something 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th relevant in the present,­ which could be rebuilt, restaged, reenacted, 7 reinvented and represented. I have preferred urban spaces and the 8 spaces with a dark history, execution sites, and some strange empty 9 places in cities as “the scenes of the crimes,” ­after Walter Benjamin, 10 who was inspired by the images by Eugène Atget. The place can be 11 fixed and indifferent, but a scene already presumes a participant, a 12 distance, a viewer, the meaning that something can happen ­there or 13 has already happened. 14 I agree to the most with Michel de Certeau that a space is a prac- 15 ticed place. A place that can be suitable for the per­for­mance, a place 16 as a stage—it can become a space through directing its possi­ ­ble so- 17 cial agendas into mise-­en-­scènes and tableaux vivants depicting desir- 18 able ideologies and conversations. The possibility of a mise-­en-­scène 19 turns ­these locations into hidden trea­sures, mining fields for artists 20 or narrators. A spoken space is a space that has its stories where 21 something that has happened ­will be revised and retold in a con­ 22 temporary context. As de Certeau put it haunted places are the only 23 ones in which people­ can live. Plus, if one happens to be a camera-­ 24 based person, add the “optical unconscious,” a term coined by Ben- 25 jamin, so very true. Unspoken and invisible places. Haunting places 26 and social spaces. Other spaces or heterotopias as Foucault described 27 them. Thus, ­there are countless ways to practice space every­ day, in 28 order to evoke one’s fantasies and dreams, to call social ghosts back. 29 It has been a plea­sure to find out­ whether it is pos­si­ble to examine 30 the space through its repre­sen­ta­tions. How the ­actual space becom- 31 ing a represen­ ­ta­tional space could make invisible social structures 32 vis­i­ble and pres­ent. 33 Places that still keep appearing in my dreams belong to my 34 childhood—­the flat where ew lived—it was not very big but the out- 35 door space was a kingdom nearby the south border of Tallinn that 36 contained a river, a forest, huge meadows, many ­children to play with, 37 some strange characters which could be seen as “­others”—­drunkards, 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 67 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th tramps, po­liti­cal abjects and persons with social stigmas (no one 2 spoke publicly of ­those who returned from Gulag concentration hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 camps), black marketers, Rus­sian army troops and hippies among hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 other remarkable figures. Our homely “Cold War” time. I guess this hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 setting created a certain carnivalesque, enchanting fabric, a perma- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 nent strain for freedom what­ever it means. 7 ­These oneiric places revolve around our small kitchen, the gas 8 stove, the Snaigė fridge, the bathroom where my parents developed 9 their black and white photographs­ in the weekends and the transis- 10 tor radio where my ­mother listened to the Voice of Amer­i­ca. I was 11 sent to calm down in the dark bathroom or in the corner of the living 12 room when I had been a naughty girl. Pedagogical spatial practice of 13 introspection! To track down the gene­ ­tic relationship to the space 14 as much as I remember and have been told one of my grand­mothers 15 died young ­because she spent all her physical strength and efforts 16 to create a huge fairytale-­like flower garden by the farm­house, the 17 other grand­mother who used to move around all of the furniture in 18 her ­house ­every other month (alone! heavy early twentieth century­ 19 solid wood stuff), my ­mother who was keeping the places where she 20 lived ­under a perfect structured control and order, just places and not 21 ­people, but perhaps, who knows, keeping certain control over the 22 ­family via her space, myself—­ending up drifting in the streets and 23 sometimes designing temporary furniture for exhibitions. 24 A nongendered flânerie. My first urban walks in Tallinn and Saint 25 Petersburg in the1980s as an art student, continued in 1992 in Paris, 26 in 1995 in New York, in 1998 in San Francisco, in 2002–2005 in 27 London, ­etc. Walking and walking and feeling the city in my feet, 28 in my legs, in my head, waiting for a change in atmosphere in dif­fer­ 29 ent neighborhoods, outskirts, wasteland, docks, ware­houses, poorer 30 suburbs. I usually do not feel much comfort in posh places, in the 31 areas where money speaks. It is a too predictable setting. In Estonia I 32 can go around and look for the metaphysics of spaces and buildings, 33 in Beijing or in London, being more and more influenced by anthro- 34 pology and sociology I wonder­ how ­people perform their everyday 35 activities. 36 While walking I can compose texts in my mind, ­settle down and 37 up ideas that circle in my head. It reminds me of a Kantian practice: 38 he is told to have been ­going for a walk ­every day at a certain time

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 68 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 in the main park of Königsberg. In 1999, when I happened to visit hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Kaliningrad, I decided­ to discover his pos­si­ble tracks, but found only 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th a miserable, wild and neglected place without any spell of aesthetics. 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th In the Soviet period, we desperately wished to be part of the Western 4 system, now we share its modes of production and democracy but 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th we are still Eastern Eu­rope. Maybe it hurt in the beginning, since 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th we wanted nothing to do with the Soviet system and its traces. We 7 knew the West as a repre­sen­ta­tion, as the “langue,” but we could not 8 practice it as a “parole.” It has been inter­ ­est­ing to follow how one 9 rhe­toric is replaced by another, quasi-religious­ “new ­human” politics 10 turns into an esoteric global consumer politics. Although we swim 11 in the pool which is tiled with Western Paroles, this is not enough 12 to overcome the psycho-­geographies—­whatever is the system, we 13 are still not perceived by the West as part of it but rather seen as the 14 postsocialist space. And who cares, except perhaps some politicians? 15 One gets used to this par­tic­u­lar identity. The most stunning thing­ 16 to realize in transformations is that the systems can be transformed 17 while the ­people can hardly do so. All that has been repressed returns 18 at some point. The revolutionary spirit with its burning flames fades 19 away fast, but its ashes become a ­great fertilizer for the spirit of con- 20 servatism and conformity. 21 22 tlostanova: Post-­socialism is a problematic construct and yet it is 23 a shared past, particularly for the people­ of our generation, a complex 24 experience that we cannot undo as much as we wanted to. It is folded 25 in our embodied memories, in our geopolitics of being, of gender, of 26 perception. How do you feel about the postsocialist critical agenda in 27 con­temporary art and/or activism today?­ Is it viable­ and promising 28 or doomed to be more and more ossified and “museumized”? We 29 are all dif­fer­ent of course, and yet is there­ anything that can allow us 30 speaking of the “postsocialist subject” or maybe even “postsocialist 31 ­woman” and if so, what lies at the core of this (self)identification? 32 ­Virginia Woolf’s famous concept of the room of one’s own—how­ does 33 it work in the case of the postsocialist ­women or does it at all? Can 34 the shared Socialist experience be a source and a ground for a possi­ ­ 35 ble co­ali­tion to make our world a better place for us all? 36 siib: No, we cannot undo it. As I just explained, it is impossible, we 37 embody it. Our bodies are trained ­under the Soviet discipline, in its 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 69 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th kindergartens, its schools and universities, in the working places. As 2 much as we wish to undo it, our bodies still remember it and act ac- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 cordingly. Living in the Soviet Union was not my personal dream, but hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 at least this bad dream ended in 1991. Its totalitarian regime had been hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 violently imposed onto my country, Estonia, and it made systemati- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 cal efforts to destroy the local spirit, memory, fabric and flesh. I do 7 not know anyone who did not suffer from it. I think we still do. Even 8 if the bodies survived, the souls are corrupted by the conformity to 9 real­ity. 10 Since Socialism in Soviet understanding meant a totalitarian regime, 11 it was a distorted version of Socialism. It meant double exploitation 12 for ­women. It meant being placed in prison or mental­ hospital if one 13 was not conformist enough. Maybe the best of this Soviet experience 14 was that so many of us ­adopted an absurd relationship with life, an 15 immunity to empty words, a prompt ability to detect lies, a skepti- 16 cism of the state and any reforms, a tactic of resis­ ­tance. The worst 17 legacy of the Soviet Socialist system is perhaps the contaminated con- 18 cepts of the left-­wing ideas such as solidarity, unions,­ emancipation, 19 equality, even the word “Socialism” itself was a taboo for some time. 20 Postsocialism as a construct could help us put the lived experi- 21 ences into a critical context, to compare the Socialist conditions of 22 the second half of the twentieth century­ with the present­ neoliberal 23 agenda. The experience of living ­under the Soviet regime could be 24 taken as an asset helping to realize what it means to live in a fr­ ee world. 25 What are ­these two systems about, where do they overlap, why do 26 they go in opposite directions? What is still wrong in this picture? 27 Of course, some ­people whose roots are in the Soviet regime expe- 28 rience ­today a Stockholm syndrome and even long for the Soviet past 29 (why?—­“at least ­there ­were neither refugees nor homosexuals”). 30 ­Others who are in power refuse to see any alternatives to their ruling 31 methods which is obviously a manifestation of ‘the one party’ syn- 32 drome. I think it is far too early to throw the postsocialist construct 33 into the waste bin or place it into a museum. 34 In ­every evil, there­ is something good to be considered, in the So- 35 viet Socialism maybe there­ ­were examples of social welfare, edu- 36 cation and solidarity, at least in words. The capi­­tal­ist abundance has 37 helped to overcome the everyday lack of goods for many; it has brought 38 freedom of speech and travel. But it has not obliterated poverty. The

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 70 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 Soviet trauma lies deep inside us beneath the new layers of life and hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th affects us more than we would like to admit. This postsocialist­ space 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th around us seems to be an aura and a stigma at the same time. Yet, it 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ­ought to be discussed through a con­temporary prism, to see how we 4 ended up where we are now. Was the Socialist condition the reason 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th or something ­else? As our society is turning to conservative values in 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th full speed, ­there is often a déjà vu feeling from the 1980s—­the strange 7 hollow rhe­toric, the doublespeak, bureaucracy, the party system and 8 the loyalty to the party, scheming, careerism, nostalgia for the Soviet 9 period, intolerance of the other, living in the ­bubble, social blindness, 10 corruption, ­etcetera. 11 Con­temporary art can deal with these­ issues critically. It can pro- 12 vide strategies to question conformity and conservative values. Even 13 more—­art can help provide re­sis­tance to dif­fer­ent policies of obedi- 14 ence. ­There is a prob­lem that quite often ­these themes get labeled 15 and ghettoed, and put aside ­because they are not considered to be 16 the proper subject of con­temporary art as an aesthetic concept. But 17 I do not see anyone ­else to deal with ­these issues rather than con­ 18 temporary artists who have time to tackle the whole­ picture in its 19 entirety, and to carry on their artistic research of the social topics. 20 How to maintain critical positions in contemporar­ y art is more and 21 more ­under question. How to make a work that is intellectually en- 22 gaging? How to avoid the blindness of the social issues, how to give 23 voice to dif­fer­ent agendas in order to make them vis­i­ble, even if ­these 24 themes are not popular,­ entertaining, or presenting another model of 25 success. Maybe Eastern Eu­rope as a place with a weaker art gallery 26 system is indeed the right space to make art from the critical posi- 27 tion and to find time to consider the politics of represen­ ­ta­tion? And 28 please, never forget about the poetry when the personal becomes the 29 po­liti­cal. 30 I played around the ideas from dif­fer­ent systems and ideologies in 31 my interactive per­for­mance Mass Line, produced by the Lilith Per­ 32 for­mance Studio in Malmö in the autumn of 2013. It was based on my 33 notes from Beijing, China, with its communist Capitalism system and 34 watching all the James Bond films, something that was banned in the 35 Soviet Union until­ the 1990s. The perfor­ ­mance merged China and the 36 Western po­liti­cal ideologies through an analy­sis and practice-­oriented 37 observation of systems, prohibitions and ­orders, both large and small. 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 71 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th In the course of Mass Line that engaged around forty professional and 2 amateur actors and the audience, we asked ourselves what space we hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 can claim when ­there is not any. In the Mass Line system, a Western hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 character like James Bond could turn into a world leader and a role hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 model. The dictator’s propaganda machinery took the karaoke form, hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 whereas entertainment for the ­people was a cheap Western copy of 7 a Beijing opera. 8 Mass Line was distinctly politi­ ­cal and yet at the same time it was a 9 highly poetic perfor­ ­mance mostly based on my own observations and 10 experience of living in a closed country. We played with large po­liti­ 11 cal and social systems that we all had to follow in order to be part of 12 the group. ­These are systems, whose intensions are to keep us occu- 13 pied, to act properly and keep us in line. In countries with power­ful 14 leadership and control system people­ used to pretend, to be someone 15 dif­fer­ent in public than at home. Every­one became an actor ready to 16 stage what the system expected from them, performing ideologies as 17 one’s second nature. And this was a wise survival tactic for everyday 18 life. In the end it is impossible to decide what a perfor­ ­mance is and 19 what is au­then­tic. 20 In my work A Room of One’s Own, a video and photo installation 21 from 2011, I tried to find out how much space was left for a­ woman 22 as a ­mother and a wife in a new suburban family­ ­house. It seems that 23 ­women and femininity are determined by space—think­ of the com- 24 munal flats in the Soviet Union or the one-family­ suburban homes 25 in Amer­i­ca in the 1950s (the Estonian equivalent is the early twenty-­ 26 first­century ­houses built in the fields close to the city). heT Soviet 27 ­woman did not need much space at home, ­because she was mostly 28 away at work. The American ­woman as a ­mother and a wife did not 29 need separate space as she was ­there to serve ­others. ­Virginia Woolf 30 stated once that a ­woman must have money and a room of her own 31 if she is to write fiction. 32 ­Women are shown their place by way of space, or as Julia Kristeva 33 said, femininity can be understood as a position in the border areas. 34 At the same time the new influences enter any culture, namely 35 through the borders. Working with the woman-­space relations I 36 have begun to see more clearly how unconscious and ­silent power 37 lines determine the behavioral patterns of men and women­ and 38 their spatial positions. Estonian women­ want to live in the Ameri-

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 72 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 can dream, but to achieve it, they have to work in town, send their hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ­children to kindergartens in town, as ­there are no such establish- 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ments near where they live, the nearest shop and even the bus stop 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th are miles away. 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th As a spatial installation, A Room of One’s Own was furnished as a 5 typically cramped sitting room in a new residential area, where the 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th viewer sees the photographs­ of the mother,­ and the TV-monitors­ 7 alternating with ­women dancing in a winter landscape. One’s own 8 room in the title does not tell us whose room it is, if it belongs to a 9 man or a ­woman. In the text, Woolf tells about a place where a ­woman 10 can be on her own, which disrupts her daily chores and makes room 11 for reflection. Like an artist’s studio, a room of her own is essential for 12 a ­woman who wants to write. This room means a disruption of the 13 mundane, and although it is furnished modestly as a sitting-­room, it 14 is a place that reflects the joy of life, ­because, according to Woolf, a 15 writer struggling in the shackles of hatred and worry cannot create 16 anything permanent. 17 The main link of the inhabitants of the new residential settlements 18 to the outside world, except their office and kindergarten in town, 19 is tele­vi­sion, the larger the better. It is so big that their neighbors 20 across the road have no need to switch theirs on. ­These ­women are 21 happy; most of them have a job and a peaceful, safe home, even if 22 storms cause occasional power cuts. ­These ­women have their own 23 ­houses, which means they have a lot more space. However, this space 24 is furnished in a very similar way. The houses­ bought with the young 25 ­family loans, feature an open kitchen, so that mothers­ could see what 26 the ­children are ­doing. ­These ­women are constantly available to their 27 families, they lack any private space. I found that the real masters of 28 the ­house are the ­children. Incidentally, quite a few of ­these ­women, 29 with a varying shade of red hair, ­were reading the book Eat. Pray. 30 Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (amazing, we wer­ e born on the same day!). 31 Artist Sirje Ainso from the Estonian diaspora in Argentina who 32 saw the installation in the Estonian pavilion at the Venice Art Bien- 33 nale in 2011 decided­ that I had Soviet nostalgia and I was showing 34 Estonia in a regretful manner: “How does the described represent 35 Estonia . . . ? Does the artist’s topic with a ‘social message’ justify this 36 display, which shows Estonia in a worse light than any ‘fourth world’ 37 country, where nobody wants to go? . . . ​Unfortunately, the artist has 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 73 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 fig. 3.2 Liina Siib, A ­Woman Takes ­Little Space. Ongoing series since 2007. Digitally 17 edited analogue color photography, pigmented ink print, 30 cm × 45 cm. Courtesy of the artist. 18 19 20 despite her education and today’­ s opportunities, both feet still firmly 21 planted in the Soviet era—is this inertia or nostalgia . . . ? Too bad 22 this chance to pres­ent Estonia as a cultured country was lost.” 23 In 2007 I began the photographic series A Woman­ Takes ­Little Space 24 as a reaction to the debate in the media about the gender-based­ dis- 25 crimination and pay gap. According to EU statistics, in Estonia the un- 26 adjusted gender pay gap was 30.9 ­percent in 2007. It which was the 27 highest in the EU and ­until now, it still is. The less paid labor­ sectors in 28 Estonia are also mostly occupied by female employees: textile industry, 29 cleaning ser­vice, social welfare, sport, amusement and leisure activi- 30 ties, food and drink ser­vices, social and cultural institutions (archives, 31 libraries, museums, ­etc.), retail trade and catering establishments. 32 I met nearly all of the women­ “who take little­ space” by chance in 33 public spaces. Mostly they wer­ e strangers, and in some cases they re- 34 mained so, although I always made a point of asking their permission 35 and explain why I needed that picture: to show a working woman­ via 36 space. I take these­ photo­graphs in order to make certain situations 37 vis­i­ble. Estonian ­women occasionally seem to be too well adapted to 38 the model of working ­women, which is prescribed by gender roles.

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 74 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 Their professional identity is largely ­shaped by their employer, who hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th arranges the workplace for ­women employees depending on the 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th nature of their work and never thinking of ­women themselves. Due 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th to submissiveness and low self-­esteem, the ­women never complain 4 about their working conditions. The retirees, the temporary em- 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ployed, or ­those fearing to be made redundant are not going­ to take 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th any risks. Many jobs with dismal conditions and low salary are taken 7 up by Russian-­speaking ­women. When I was taking the pictures, I nat- 8 urally asked myself, “What can a ­woman do in a situation like this?” 9 Thus, I started wondering what the situation is like for building 10 co­ali­tions, solidarity, benevolent and trust-­respect relationships at 11 the working place in the circumstances of precarious ­labor and in 12 the society that mostly praises success and individuality. Considering 13 differences as a resource of power, performing mutual empowerment 14 can raise the courage to stand firm for one’s rights, including the rights 15 for gender equality. Solidarity presumes an ability to communicate 16 and, following Karl Marx, space plays an impor­tant role in the devel- 17 opment of the social consciousness, as through communication the 18 groups can prove their solidarity to ­others. The con­temporary pre- 19 carious work creates mi­grant spaces. What­ever the space, one needs 20 to expand it for relations, bonds, links that can bring any groups of 21 in­equality together—­for support, humor, sympathy, and solidarity 22 against the market and the philosophy of profit which erase our hu- 23 manity ­every second and in ­every aspect. To find a balance between 24 “solidaire” and “solitaire.” 25 26 tlostanova: What strikes me in most of your work is a subtle and 27 multilayered irony, a cunning tongue-­in-­cheek rendering of often 28 painful and cruel subjects, which in my perception is similar to the 29 Armenian Queering Yerevan Collective’s tactic of slant activism. 30 (Instead of confronting the patriarchal and heteronormative state 31 head-on, the members of this collective use indirect, ironic, double-­ 32 entendre ways of making their po­liti­cal and aesthetic statements.) In 33 your fascinating proj­ect A ­Woman Takes ­Little Space you apply irony 34 very effectively, weaving it through your complex reflections on the 35 prescribed ­women’s roles, unchanging ­under any regimes (demo­cratic 36 or autocratic), the curse of muteness and submissiveness and various­ 37 ways of ­going around and beyond it, the inescapable objectification, 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 75 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and creativity and freedom crammed into constrained spatial condi- 2 tions in both literal and figurative sense. Do you think then that irony hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 is more effective than any blunt collision with, or re­sis­tance to power hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 and authority? Do you see irony as a power­ful decolonizing force? hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 siib: Oh, I did not know about the Queering Yerevan Collective’s hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 work before. A ­Woman Takes ­Little Space depicts quite dif­fer­ent 7 ­women in their working environment. Sometimes they argued that 8 ­there was nothing par­tic­u­lar in them, that ­there was no point in taking 9 pictures of them. They did not consider the image of a working woman­ 10 to be worthwhile or beautiful. And so there­ are not many images of 11 ­women in their workplaces in today’­ s media, except when a business 12 goes bust. At the same time I do not want to repeat the ideological 13 construction where ­human beings in their daily situation are placed in 14 a heroic presented as victims. As for situations, it was impor­tant that a 15 point in the passing randomness momentarily touched upon a point in 16 myself, has made me identify with a person and a situation. It is a sub- 17 jective sympathy of a sort. A ­woman becomes an actor who plays her 18 own life, as in a neo-­realist approach. Most of the represented ­women 19 have had a good sense of humor that was reflected in the photographs­ 20 as well. Humor attracts humor? ­Isn’t it a possibility for a co­ali­tion?! 21 But, yes, irony has also been with me as long as I remember. For 22 me it has been difficult to be solemn, serious, even in the hardest situ- 23 ations, even when dealing with the subject that I do care and am se- 24 rious about. But the tactics, the approach . . . . ​Yes, it is something 25 ­else. Recently I have been thinking critically about my ironic position. 26 Why am I ironical, even cynical, in some works? Maybe it has to do 27 with the language; maybe the ­bitter truth is easier to convey through 28 humor or satire. Maybe this is an inseparable part of me as a “post- 29 socialist” subject. ­People who have lived ­under totalitarian regimes 30 acquire a bred-­in-­the-­bone irony as part of their survival strategy. . 31 I elaborated on this theme in my video work Compromise Excluded, 32 in which illusion and real­ity ­were hopelessly and schizophrenically 33 mixed, but the pos­si­ble fictitiousness of situations was quite decep- 34 tive. It grew out of pervasive violence­ that occurred in recent Es- 35 tonian history. The heroes wer­ e extremists, the totalitarian left-and­ 36 right-­wingers, Communists and Fascists who rejected pluralism and 37 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 76 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 fig. 3.3 Liina Siib, still image at 12 minutes, 41 seconds from the video Mass Line: 14 Office 1. 2013. Produced by Lilith Per­for­mance Studio, Malmö, Sweden. Courtesy of 15 the artist. 16 17 detested demo­cratic pro­cesses. The videos, mostly explored the well-­ 18 known places of aggression and executions. Her­ e the location itself 19 became one of the characters in the story. Irony comes into play when 20 real­ity cannot be reasonably signified; when truth and lies are hope- 21 lessly confused. Irony, then, is a signifying practice, an action. The 22 absurd is even more an action than irony. I ­really like the Dadaist prac- 23 tices and have come to do similar things­ myself more often. It also 24 seems that putting together the high and the low is often rewarding. 25 There is a problem­ with irony: it somehow offers a safe position, 26 a safe distance between the subject and the audience. It confirms the 27 existing patterns. This has made me think if I am ­really ­doing justice 28 to my subjects this way. I have used the irony consciously as a figure of 29 speech, as my rhe­toric that enables me to perform a montage-like­ 30 repre­sen­ta­tion, with juxtapositions and counterpoints. Who knows, 31 maybe humor is a better way to stress the empathy. An ironic person 32 remains a passive bystander; all she can do is to bitterly sneer at the 33 hopeless circumstances and situations. A dif­fer­ent ­thing would be to 34 take irony to a totally new level, ­because in the new brave world of 35 bureaucrats, we are facing the new totalitarianism, and here­ some- 36 thing has to be done without mercy. 37 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 77 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th tlostanova: For me, you are a paradigmatic border person in the 2 sense that you do not seem to belong in ­either of the many worlds hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 along which you travel. Yet you travel along ­these dif­fer­ent worlds, hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 not necessarily ­human (but maybe companion species), and some- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 times quite marginal and forbidden for many other people,­ with an hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 open and interested mind and with a loving perception, as María Lu- 7 gones once said. At the same time, there­ is a certain detachment, a 8 certain additional dimension always pres­ent in your optics. It could 9 be connected with your many travels abroad as well as with the very 10 fact that you are an artist who never entirely belongs and is always 11 between dif­fer­ent worlds, and therefore sees more than ­those who 12 belong to just one world. At times it seems that you look even at your- 13 self from aside. Still, I would like to ask you if ­there are any impor­tant 14 anchors for your soul, to paraphrase Salman Rushdie, such as language, 15 place, customs or people,­ that would help you define your belonging, 16 or you feel yourself entirely a worldly person even if physically you may 17 continue living in Estonia? In general, is such a belonging and feeling 18 at home impor­tant for you? Or ­these are outdated concepts? 19 siib: Anchors—­outdated or not—­I do feel cosmopolitan for sure. 20 My ­family has kept me in Estonia, the graves of my ancestors. I am 21 as morbid as any proper Estonian who has plenty of funeral photos 22 in their ­family ­albums: grand­mothers, grand­fathers, the ­father, the 23 ­mother. My ­mother died this summer (2015) and ­after her death the 24 feeling of being a complete “stranger” ­here has strongly struck me. It 25 seems like with my mother,­ I have lost my country, although a citi- 26 zen, I have become a ­mental refugee. But fortunately I still have very 27 good friends that make me feel at home. Friendships really­ ­matter. 28 And sometimes I remember that it was certainly the highlight of my 29 life when the iron curtain fell, we could finally­ travel and Estonia 30 regained its in­de­pen­dence. Freedom is the main ­thing. The possibil- 31 ity to decide on my own and to make my own choices. And always 32 reminding myself of re­sis­tance. 33 I have always liked the fable by Jean de La Fontaine “The Wolf and 34 The Dog,” where the latter praises his good life and almost convinces 35 the Wolf. But suddenly the Wolf detects a galled spot on his neck: 36 “What’s that?” he cries. “Oh, nothing but a speck . . . 37 ­Perhaps the collar’s mark by which they chain me.” 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 78 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 “Chain! Chain you! What! Run you not, then, hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Just where you please and when?” 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th “Not always, sir; but what of that?” 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th “Enough for me, to spoil your fat!” . . . !” . . . 4 I like languages—if I did not become an artist, I would have 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th wished to become a linguist. I do feel belonging to nature and to cul- 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ture, certainty to the art community. Films, books, everyday practices 7 and history are all part of my homeland, as well as teaching at the art 8 acad­emy, discussing con­temporary art context. And there­ is some id- 9 iosyncrasy in my works that reappears again and again, like the social 10 aspects of life in a society and its margins—­the ­people. 11 Looking at myself from aside—I­ remember doing­ this already 12 from my childhood—I­ have always looked at myself with someone 13 ­else’s eyes. This knowledge has not made me happier though. I try 14 to keep things­ dynamic, to see what happens, acting by nonacting. 15 It is difficult to take seriously anything that becomes a system or a 16 method that becomes orthodox, and quite often a belonging to any 17 group can become just that—a­ frozen orthodoxy. I do not go to the 18 barricades, but rather to the outskirts, to observe how the other half 19 lives. ­There are too many themes, but they keep repeating like the 20 places on my photos—­graveyards, ships, and prisons. . . . 21 22 tlostanova: How would you define the po­liti­cal potential of art in 23 ­today’s world? Is art less or more effective than social movements or 24 critical theories in changing real­ity and the way ­people think and see 25 the world? What is a politi­ ­cal art for you? Should art be politi­ ­cal at 26 all and in what ways if so? Godard once said that instead of making 27 po­liti­cal filmshe wants to make films po­liti­cally. Do you think it is an 28 impor­tant distinction ­today? Or maybe ethical and other dimensions 29 are more impor­tant for art than politics? 30 siib: The politi­ ­cal potential of art and the possibility of choosing 31 the tools for the politics of represen­ ­ta­tion is something that seems 32 always to be pres­ent in art as one of its impor­tant characteristics. 33 When ­there is “us” and “them,” there­ is always politics, a politi­ ­cal 34 situation. In repressive ideological environments, even escapist art 35 can declare a certain politics. In ­today’s world the amount of infor- 36 mation is im­mense and it is easy to lose one’s sight and mind, not to 37 mention one’s focus. It is easier to turn to entertainment, but even 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 79 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th in that sphere there­ are politi­ ­cal ave­nues. How then can we shape 2 a lucid artistic position, how can we keep it in accordance with the hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 dynamics of time and how not to become an opportunist willing to hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 grab the “urgent” and “burning” issues for easy po­liti­cal profit? ­These hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 are the questions and the hard work to accomplish. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 ­There are at least two kinds of politi­ ­cal connotations in any art- 7 work: first, the immediate reaction to everyday reality­ , and second, 8 the hidden layers that only begin to speak when time passes by. I 9 doubt that much of the Soviet time resis­ ­tance art would have the 10 same significance fortoday’ ­ s viewer as it used to be in the closed 11 society with its doublespeak. Yet if an avant-­garde resisting art piece 12 ­will be hung alongside the mainstream commissioned po­liti­cally cor- 13 rect art work, the intelligent viewer would hopefully detect the dif- 14 ference, the boundary between the truth and the lie, and also see 15 the dif­fer­ent regimes of represen­ ­ta­tion. Of course, here­ irony is a 16 catalyst. Good art always has several layers and if done honestly with 17 one’s heart and mind, the new layers of meaning ­will emerge and 18 manifest the latent po­liti­cal agenda in a new context. 19 Art as any other form within a culture should aim for critical at- 20 titude and signification, for the new forms, for a contemporar­ y mo- 21 ment, for re­sis­tance to stagnation. Art should aim to exist alongside 22 with real­ity in order to influence it and—who­ knows?—­maybe also 23 change this real­ity, ­because changes always start from the tiniest 24 ­things. The best thing­ to do is to be responsible, honest to oneself 25 and to speak with and to the society. Even if the society does not care 26 immediately, one still has to continue speaking. 27 With the hegemony of images and cultural consumption, art cer- 28 tainly has more impact as a (cultural) product, yet well-made­ and cu- 29 rated exhibitions create spaces for thinking and sharing and inspire 30 new ideas. Art is the last island for transgression in the po­liti­cally 31 correct world. It is trying out and expanding the borders of ­human 32 existence and freedom. ­There could be mutual empowerment among 33 artists and ­people they work with that I find impor­tant and essential. 34 Godard saying he wants to make films politi­ ­cally could mean the 35 same ­thing about representation—­either the work of art is a repre­ 36 sen­ta­tion of politics (as ­there are so many commissioned works and 37 works made ­under vari­ous totalitarian regimes, the ideological art) 38 or it shows the politics of repre­sen­ta­tion, when the personal becomes

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 80 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 the po­liti­cal. ­Every artist has to find a balancehere­ , to answer these­ hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th questions for themselves. And sometimes the work made innocently 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th can become a politi­ ­cal statement as well, no matter­ how humble­ was 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th the initial idea of an artist. Ethical implications are certainly impor­ 4 tant and making art should not harm (physically or psychologically) 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th anyone involved in the project.­ In this respect­ any artist has to show 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th responsibility. On the other hand, as I mentioned before, art is the 7 last space of transgression which is left ­today, the space where the 8 craziest ideas can be explored and implemented. Anyway, artists 9 should try to avoid the social blindness as much as pos­si­ble, and 10 should address urgent prob­lems with their oeuvres. To be pres­ent 11 and to swim against the current. 12 13 tlostanova: In our conversation in Tallinn, you mentioned that 14 you are now fascinated with factories. Can you elaborate a little­ bit 15 on why factories attract your attention as an artist in this notorious 16 postindustrial age? 17 siib: As an art student in the late 1980s, we had a compulsory in- 18 ternship at dif­fer­ent factories to draw and paint the working pro­cess 19 and the factory environments. Although the views ­were rather grim, 20 badly lit, with oppressive conditions, I was still quite fascinated with the 21 con­vey­or system and the grandeur of space, the production scale and 22 sounds. In 1998 I made a series Le Carceri in an abandoned cellulose fac- 23 tory in Tallinn where space played the most impor­tant role as an imagi- 24 nary architecture of a sacred and notorious post-industrialist­ place. 25 In a way, technology and production are quite in place in the 26 agenda of graphic arts and printmaking. Some ten years ago I taught 27 a course called “­Human being and factory” for the graphic depart- 28 ment of the art acad­emy, the title refers ironically to the Soviet period 29 theme art exhibitions which ­were held annually. Back then artists 30 had to show their connection with the working people,­ no ­matter 31 was it ­really their commitment or not. It was done for the represen­ ­ 32 ta­tion of politics. So I deci­ded to examine what has happened to the 33 factories in the post-­industrial time and how the proletariat looked 34 in the 2000s. 35 Together with the students we visited several bigger factories 36 in Tallinn. It was an inter­ ­est­ing mapping, to see how the analogue 37 technologies have given way to the highly computerized pro­cesses 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 81 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th with fewer workers, and how the old work benches existed side by 2 side with computers. Walter Benjamin wrote on the special aura in hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” I think hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 that one can also speak of the aura of production sites. But their re- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 production is another thing—at­ least in photography, and here­ some- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 thing has to be constructed, as Benjamin states in his essay talking 7 about the Krupp factories. The aspect of this “something” which “has 8 to be constructed” was initially proposed by Bertolt Brecht, ­because 9 the reproduction of reality­ hardly says anything about reality­ which is 10 an impor­tant ­factor to consider also in terms of po­liti­cal art. ­Later I 11 reshaped the course for the “twenty-­first­century worker” and made a 12 visual research survey through time from the beginning of the twenti- 13 eth ­century with its Fordist and Soviet industrial ideas until­ nowadays 14 tlostanova: Looking back at your dif­fer­ent works, you have been 15 dealing with a diverse array of subjects from gender to alienation and 16 loneliness, from gazing to precariousness, from growing social gaps 17 and exclusion to the contradictions and the darker sides of childhood, 18 from the economy of public and private spaces to the mechanics of 19 memory and especially embodied memory, and much more. What are 20 you interested in and what have you found impor­tant to address ­today? 21 22 siib: Too many ­things. Nowadays, I am continuing with the same 23 ­interests and themes—in an altered way, perhaps, but the subjects I 24 address are still the same: injustice, social haunting, strug­gles for sur- 25 vival, ideological constructions, conformity, and compromises. What 26 does it mean to be human?­ Perhaps I have adopted­ a more ac- 27 tive position, bringing into the exhibition performative approaches, 28 interactions, the pro­cess itself rather than the end product of art. I 29 implement my observations and visual and photographic notes in 30 per­for­mances and reenactments, thus rebuilding the situations. 31 Aristotle said that in order to remember things­ we need a place. 32 Places as empty stages incite the viewer’s imagination. Forgetting is 33 not enough to overcome a difficult burden,because­ every­thing comes 34 back sooner or later.­ Memory lets itself be repressed to a certain ex- 35 tent. But then it turns into a creative starting point. The process­ of 36 reenacting historical events in contemporar­ y settings, imbuing them 37 with new meanings, offers a new chance for something already for- 38 gotten, loading it with a contemporar­ y moment. This is impor­tant

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 82 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 as it can help make the work comprehensible to the audience. Ther­ e hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th must be contemporar­ y ele­ments in the works in order to make them 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th relevant or even urgent in ­today’s situations. 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Theoretically, I have been lately interested in emblems and how 4 images repeat themselves through history, how society is constructed 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and how it consciously and unconsciously influences our minds and 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ideologies, how ­people perform their everyday lives, the remains of 7 rituals, emptied of any significance or any principal idea. Practically, 8 visualizing re­sis­tance is something with which I would like to go 9 on, to study and comment on it. Two sentences describing our con­ 10 temporary condition keep haunting me: 11 12 1) “Every­one wants to survive.” 13 2) “One has to hide emotions in order to keep the job.” 14 Even I myself was told some months ago by a colleague at the art 15 acad­emy that I am too emotional. So I think I have to do something 16 with emotions, too. And affects. 17 What is urgent is how to remain an ethical human­ being, how 18 to save ­human space, empathy, solidarity, benevolence. In the global 19 world where every­one is trying to survive, it is easy to become blind 20 ­toward certain groups, classes, phenomena that are just outside the 21 focus. It is easy to start living in one’s ­bubble. What remains signifi- 22 cant over time? One’s body, freedom of choice and speech, the joy of 23 living (joie de vivre), and one’s home. 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 83 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 CHAPTER FOUR 13 14 15 16 Beyond Dependencies: A Talk with Vyacheslav Akhunov, 17 the Lonely Ranger of Uzbek Con­temporary Art 18 19 20 21 22 madina tlostanova: In a number of present­ day authoritarian 23 states, succeeding the USSR, once again, the power dictates the art- 24 ists what their art should be like. What changes is only the ideologi- 25 cal stuffing (usually,there ­ is a shift to a hysterical national patriotic 26 mood), while the mechanisms of imposing unan­i­mous thinking and 27 unan­i­mous stylistics remain largely the same. In the USSR the artists 28 reacted to this pressure among other ­things, through the underground 29 movement, and you have acted as one of the impor­tant underground 30 artists. Do you think that a second edition of the underground is pos­si­ 31 ble ­today on the remnants of the Soviet empire, including a revival of 32 its importance and influence? Or it is not pos­si­ble to step twice into 33 the same river, and the time, the context and the ­people have changed 34 so much that the presence of the underground ambience (such as the 35 apartment exhibitions) does not automatically mean that the spirit 36 of the underground is back? 37 vyacheslav akhunov: The difference between the underground 38 in the USSR and the art of postcolonial Uzbekistan is enormous, in

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 84 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 spite of the fact that the Soviet totalitarian system has not been dis- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th mantled in Uzbekistan. In the USSR the available information was so 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th carefully filtered that any sources or true facts related to the modern- 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ist art, ­were practically inaccessible. Paradoxically, this serious short- 4 age of knowledge generated persis­ ­tent efforts to find information 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th that would not be infected by ideological clichés. Some of it could 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th be fished out from books and articles written by the Soviet art critics 7 who specialized in the criticism of bourgeois art from the viewpoint 8 of the Marxist-­Leninist aesthetics. 9 An artist who was the first to find information on this or that 10 modernist movement, could then quickly apply it to his own work, 11 adding some local Soviet features as well, and even be considered 12 a rather advanced Soviet modernist. This is what happened in the 13 “nonconformist” context, for example in the works of Osсar Rabin, 14 who was ­under the influence of René Magritte, or Ilya Kabakov who 15 was strongly influenced by Joseph Kosuth. In other words we are 16 speaking ­here of rediscovering of Western modernist art in the her- 17 metic totalitarian society, isolated from the rest of the world by the 18 “iron curtain.” In reality­ , for the USSR this was a time of discovery of 19 the white spots on the map of the world art. And this process­ gener- 20 ated a ­great thirst and willingness to see the forbidden and inacces- 21 sible with one’s own eyes, even if it was only mediated by our own 22 Soviet artists. Following jazz, blues, rock-­n-­roll, Pepsi Cola and jeans 23 the USSR was penetrated by the con­temporary Western art. Interest- 24 ingly enough, this art had not reached the Soviet capitals of Central 25 Asia and Kazakhstan to such an extent that it could trigger a self-­ 26 organization of even a small group of nonconformist artists, or could 27 lead to an emergence of the underground and its typical exhibition 28 practices in the form of apartment and closed exhibitions, Samizdat 29 and vari­ous dissident activities. 30 From 1973 to 1980, as a student of the Moscow Art Institute I had 31 to go back and forth two or three times a year from Central Asia to 32 Moscow. When I started making conceptual art I wanted to find like-­ 33 minded ­people in my native Kirgizia and in Uzbekistan. But I could 34 not find themeither ­ in Tashkent, or in Fergana and Frunze. Ther­ e 35 ­were no underground writers, poets, artists or film directors. Later­ I 36 understood that in the logic of Empire, ­every thinking individual was 37 striving to get out of the provincial oppression and get settled in the 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 85 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th metropolis (“All the best for the capital of the empire!” The food, the 2 advanced technologies, the best specialists, theaters, actors, museums, hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 libraries and so on). It was not a secret that many parents wer­ e dream- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 ing of sending their children­ to study in the metropolis so that ­later hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 they could somehow manage to stay there­ for good. Toda­ y the rich hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 Western countries are an attractive place for ­people with extraordi- 7 nary abilities, but in ­those times such a place was the Empire’s capital. 8 Having become the “Muscovites,” the former provincial ­people ­were 9 able to raise their status, particularly in the eyes of ­those compatri- 10 ots who were­ left on the outskirts of the evil empire. The presence of 11 the diplomatic corps and foreign embassies, of the Soviet specialists 12 who worked abroad and foreign students—all­ that was the source of 13 information which created an appropriate climate for the “small break- 14 throughs,” particularly in culture and art. In contrast with the metrop- 15 olis the provinces lacked many privileges and first of all, information. 16 The Moscow underground was comprised of both the local artists 17 and the ones who came from the provincial places. Inquisitive minds 18 from the Asian republics, Kazakhstan, the Caucasus, from such re- 19 gions as Siberia, the Urals, the Far East, and the South of Russia­ ­were 20 excluded from the nonconformist art process­ ­unless they moved to 21 Moscow. They did it for many reasons and primarily in the quest 22 of an environment consisting of the like-minded­ ­people, a context in 23 which their works would be recognized and cause reflection. 24 In 1979 I wrote the following words: “A new époque has come—­ 25 the époque of developed socialism, which allows for the discussion 26 of vari­ous prob­lems and problematization in art. Toda­ y the Soviet 27 art is divided into the official and nonofficial, or in the opinion of 28 ­those in power, into the correct and incorrect art. The correct is the 29 socialist realism and the incorrect is all the rest, which does not focus 30 on ideology but on Western modernism instead. ­There emerged such 31 concepts as “us” and “them” (same and other, native and foreign). 32 We are the correct ones. They are incorrect, the bad guys, almost 33 traitors of the homeland, enemies and renegades. And no cultural 34 dialogue is pos­si­ble between us and them, between the Soviet us and 35 the Western others.­ They are with others,­ and we are against them—­ 36 this is the logic of the representatives of the official art. The internal 37 multicultural context in the Soviet art was constructed according to 38 the formula “national in its form and socialist in its essence.”

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 86 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 In the pres­ent day Uzbekistan the situation is dif­fer­ent: hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 1) There is no hunger for information anymore. Any information hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 on con­temporary art is available now including po­liti­cal activ- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 ism in art forms. 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2) It is pos­si­ble to freely choose as your artistic priority any—­ 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th “ism,” to create and exhibit your works. 7 3) The artist is allowed to travel anywhere. 8 Yet each of ­these new freedoms has its “but” . . . ​It is all allowed 9 and pos­si­ble only up to the point when an artist’s work approaches 10 a boundary behind­ which ­there starts a discussion of the social and 11 po­liti­cal prob­lems of con­temporary Uzbekistan. 12 If the Moscow artistic underground of the 1960–1970s, was pre- 13 dominantly interested in innovative modernist forms which in the 14 conditions of the Cold War was in itself considered a serious po­liti­cal 15 mishap, ­today it is the artists and the po­liti­cal activists who comprise 16 the underground. Ther­ e are reasons for that. Art is in a dif­fer­ent situ- 17 ation. Due to the impossibility of producing new forms, the main 18 concern is repre­sen­ta­tion and not innovation. The medium has to 19 switch all the efforts ­towards the repre­sen­ta­tion of the message using 20 the old signs put together in dif­fer­ent new combinations. Ten the 21 artistic innovation as a revelation of Truth is not pos­si­ble. Focusing 22 on repre­sen­ta­tion, particularly of politi­ ­cal discourse, transfers the re- 23 sponsibility for innovation to the audience, making it a co-participant­ 24 in the art process­ equally responsible for its results. In other words, 25 we have a situation in which art (in this case, politi­ ­cally active art) is 26 not created for the ­people, but rather is completely delegated to the 27 ­people who decide themselves what to choose. 28 The main repre­sen­ta­tions are the art forms connected with action- 29 ism, happening, perfor­ ­mance, which require a space and an audi- 30 ence. This does not always fit into the idea of apartment exhibitions. 31 ­Today an apartment exhibition can exist in a dif­fer­ent format when 32 an artist makes a per­for­mance at some place, and hundreds of specta- 33 tors can stay home and watch the action on-­line or share with each 34 other their own mini apartment exhibitions which due to censorship 35 could not get to any official museum space. 36 But we are speaking of a rather small group of politi­ ­cally active 37 artists. While the majority remains ignorant. Consider the fact that 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 87 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th all the gradu­ates of the Uzbek Art Institute who ­were sent to continue 2 their studies in Europe­ (similarly to the Soviet Union where people­ hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 ­were sent to study in Moscow and Leningrad on the national quota) hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 came back not knowing what is modernism and contemporar­ y art. A hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 150-­year period of art history has remained unknown to them. They hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 never learned to speak the language of modernity and express what 7 is of current interest. “We wer­ e studying the great­ legacy of the Re­ 8 nais­sance masters,”—­was their answer. They are disgusted and an- 9 noyed with con­temporary art as an expression of liberal Eu­ro­pean 10 values, ­because instead of studying the contemporaneity they wer­ e 11 busy reading the hackneyed recipes­ from the old art cook book. Her­ e, 12 among the provincial artistic plankton, they feel at ease. This is not 13 a colonial legacy, rather it is an effect of reflection—an internal colo- 14 nization of the country and the people­ as a result of the continuous 15 Soviet phobias of the Uzbek po­liti­cal leadership. 16 In a totalitarian state where society is held together by fear and 17 national-­patriotic propaganda, ­there is no space for contemporar­ y art. 18 The official artistic community and the “Acad­emy of Arts” work for 19 maintaining the myth that both national and con­temporary art ­doesn’t 20 only exist, but also flourish pretending that such artistic forums as the 21 Tashkent biennial of con­temporary art, plays an impor­tant role in the 22 life of society and the state. Largely it is a self-­deception strategy. 23 tlostanova: In several interviews you speak of your rejection or at 24 least, a very cautious attitude to tradition as it is understood in the of- 25 ficial aesthetics imposed from above. You link tradition—­interpreted 26 in such way—­with an inescapable second-­handedness of cultural 27 production in the postsoviet countries. It seems to me that this can 28 be called a colonized consciousness and perception, and today­ more 29 often, it is a voluntary self-­colonization. Yet, do you believe there­ is 30 some other, not necessarily tradition (as in my view this word itself 31 is too negatively overloaded from the start and marked as stagnant, 32 dark and bad in comparison with modernity), but maybe some sys- 33 tem of aesthetic notions which would be dif­fer­ent from the global 34 unified production and also from the local provincial and distorted 35 understanding of national culture and mentality, seen as detached 36 from the course of time and from the needs and wishes of the real 37 ­people? And if such an open and flexible system does exist­after all, 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 88 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF fig. 4.1 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Vyacheslav Akhu- 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th nov, USSR Stamps 3 and Seals (Lenin: hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 To conduct a mer- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ciless mass terror. 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th To lock the suspi- 6 cious in the con- 7 centration camps.) 8 1977. Paper, serial 9 print, watercolor, 10 40 cm × 29.5 cm. Courtesy of the 11 artist. 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 at least potentially, should the artists turn to it and remake it? And if 26 yes then how, in what forms? 27 akhunov: Let us first remember the history: In the nineteen twen- 28 ties ­there ­were efforts to create a revolutionary Central Asian art of 29 avant-­garde type by means of subleasing the “second futurist coming” 30 (Аlexander Volkov and ­others)1. By the early 1930s an artistic system 31 with Socialist realist definitions (such as futurological utopia) was 32 forcefully imposed. Its local departments ­were created within one 33 state organ­ization—­the Artists’ Union with the headquarters in the 34 capital of the Empire. From this center all the appropriate recommen- 35 dations, ­orders, and instructions wer­ e dispatched to all regional and 36 ethnic-­national cultural centers of the country, up to the indications 37 of what topics to explore and in what realistic manner to depict them. 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 89 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th All of these­ pro­cesses had a clear ideologically determined goal: 2 to help the party to remake (colonize) ­people’s consciousness taking hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 into account their local conditions, that is to make a new identity, a hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 Soviet person, a builder of communism in the context of the active hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 destruction of age-­old traditions. In several de­cades the Soviet art hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 had developed a Socialist tradition with its own hierarchy. In fact, 7 what the Czarist government did not manage to do in its colonies (to 8 colonize ­people’s minds and feelings) in almost sixty years of its rule, 9 the communist ideologues accomplished in just three de­cades. The 10 ideological discourse of Socialist realism corrupted the culture and 11 art of all the countries that belonged to the Socialist camp, drawing 12 them into the funnel of hy­poc­risy and carrion and causing a social 13 and spiritual duality in the artists’ minds and imaginations. 14 Have the Uzbek artists ­really reconsidered ­after becoming “in­ 15 de­pen­dent” the “age old local historical and cultural models and 16 the almost hundred years of the Soviet tradition?” Hardly so . . . ​The 17 ­artists with the Soviet aesthetic training changed the ­faces, clothes 18 and names of their characters, but other­wise the vector remained the 19 same: they make the state and business commissioned works, focus 20 on sales, local market, and serving the power structures. Indeed, for 21 ­those who are used to live and work within the state regulations and 22 ­under the spell of the outdated notions, it is hardly possi­ ­ble to risk a 23 step ­towards any creative in­de­pen­dence. 24 In the 1990s, when the Soviet restrictions ­were lifted, the ma- 25 jority of artists never managed to find a new place in the unknown 26 and hence uncomfortable cultural environment. Having lost the 27 dismantled Artists’ Union, they did not strive for the emergence of 28 any in­de­pen­dent creative groups and ­unions based on their shared 29 specificprofessional ethics and con­temporary aesthetic contexts. On 30 the contrary, they wanted to be united once again into yet another 31 agency or­ga­nized by the top down directive. 32 And what about the new generations of artists who have not expe- 33 rienced the horrors of the totalitarian regime but gladly play the game 34 imposed by the state? What makes them so sluggish in their quest for 35 a new language? Hardly can we interpret this as an expression of some 36 internal instinct, which developed due to local historical, religious, 37 philosophic or aesthetic traditions. But the Soviet tradition as we 38 know not only destroyed all local models, but also carefully protected

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 90 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 the common people­ and the artists from the alien social constructs hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and from some feeble efforts to build a new aesthetic real­ity. 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Nevertheless, one can trace a delayed line in the works of Uzbek 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th artists—­originally a protest line which was completely exhausted by 4 the 1970s–80s. It was ­shaped as an interest in the Oriental practices 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th such as Sufism, Daoism, and Zen-Buddhism.­ We should remember 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th that the Sufi concept of the “idealhuman ­ being” and its doctrine of 7 moral perfection ­were at one point regarded as Muslim ideological 8 opposition, and ­today plays the part of the spiritual and ethical oppo- 9 sition to the existing authoritarian regime. Yet what in the USSR was 10 an alternative to the Soviet ideology and therefore was banned, today­ 11 is no longer a threat to the dominant discourse, which is working for 12 the creation of the national patriotic narrative. The administration 13 even restores the monuments on Sufi graves and many Sufis are now 14 considered the national spiritual heroes. 15 The postmodernist époque considerably smoothed out the bound­ 16 aries between the so called Eastern-­oriented and Western-­oriented 17 artists. The artists’ demands reach far beyond their local, regional 18 bound­aries. They are no longer interested in external, often exotic 19 sides of their culture. ­There is a deeply grounded wish to get to the 20 roots. In such a context, a propensity for one’s own tradition, not en- 21 riched by the worldly experience, becomes a dead-­end in the artist’s 22 quest and development. It is useless to break lances on what is ­today 23 an Uzbek artist—an “Asian type,” a “Euro­ ­pean type,” or some variety 24 of Eurasianism. 25 ­There is a threatening pressure of the never dismantled past on 26 the pres­ent. But how deeply does the splinter of passeism sit in the 27 unconsciousness of Uzbek artists? I think that ­there has never been 28 such a penchant for the past, such conservatism, such a hostile at- 29 titude to contemporar­ y art—­for ­those who even in the Soviet times 30 managed to find the boldest and most extraordinary creative deci- 31 sions. Their spiritual and plastic quests have always taken unusual 32 routs and they are the least prone to the influences of the olden times 33 or someone ­else’s ideas and notions. 34 The technology of colonization of ­people’s minds has remained 35 the same as a legacy of the previous colonial system, but ­today we 36 are speaking of the internal self-­colonization as a result of the lack- 37 ing decolonization pro­cesses. Up to now the majority of the citizens 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 91 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th considers Uzbekistan a remaining part of the former Soviet Union, a 2 “USSR reserve.” Partly such a reflection is linked to the fact that most hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 of the ­people who live in Uzbekistan lack any national identity. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 The mixture of the Soviet and the post-­Soviet combined with the hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 lack of any creative and intelligent specialists from any area (from hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 cultural studies to sociology, history, art, liter­ ­a­ture and up to the ideo- 7 logues and po­liti­cal scientists) at the ser­vice of power, falsifications of 8 history through a forceful erasing of the collective memory—­all this 9 has generated a provincial and distorted understanding of national 10 culture, and as a result—­a cultural decline. In the end the ­people and 11 the country are offered a simulacrum of culture and art, a semblance 12 of poorly masked primitive wild capitalism, a group in power who is 13 far from ­people’s interests, a noncompetitive economy, and the hastily 14 masked social prob­lems which can easily turn into po­liti­cal. 15 In ­these conditions no breakthrough to a higher social, politi­ ­cal 16 or cultural level is pos­si­ble. Neither is it pos­si­ble to work for the 17 creation of a system of aesthetic notions answering the present­ con- 18 ditions and national features. We need intellectuals whose deficit 19 have already become customary, and we need a will­ of the ruling 20 elite. ­Every person’s contribution is impor­tant if this person is able to 21 create a globally competitive product, thus attracting the attention 22 to the history, culture and the prob­lems of our country [Uzbekistan]. 23 The more such ­people emerge (scholars, cultural activists, artists, 24 specialists of the highest rank in dif­fer­ent spheres of human­ activ- 25 ity), the more chances ­there would be to take the country out of its 26 stagnation. Such individuals have discovered an open and flexible 27 system of aesthetic notions which can function in the conditions of 28 escaping the discipline of power structures in the detached and fr­ ee 29 border space. As a result something new can emerge in the end. 30 tlostanova: In a number of your texts you mention the original 31 and in­de­pen­dent style of “Socialist modernism” that started to be 32 ­shaped in the end of the Soviet period, yet, due to the well-­known 33 historical events, was ­later wrapped up and sadly replaced with neo­ 34 co­lo­nial mimicking styles and repetitions of someone ­else’s ideas. Can 35 a new and original style emerge ­today similar to Socialist modernism 36 and if yes, what would be its main strategies, techniques and nodal 37 points? Or all the points of nonreturn are already passed and con­ 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 92 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 temporary art from the ex-­Soviet countries is indeed doomed? Your hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th own work has successfully testified the opposite demonstrating that 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Uzbekistan does have con­temporary art. Which artists do you find 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th the most representative of the post-­Soviet ­human condition? 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th akhunov: for the original style or a new artistic trend to emerge, a 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th border situation is necessary when the old cannot exist anymore and 7 the wind of change is breaking into the entrance door. Of course the 8 old should be able to help develop the new. As I said earlier, ­today 9 the main concern is repre­sen­ta­tion and not innovation due to a com- 10 plete exhaustion of the form-­building pro­cess. In the absence of such 11 pro­cess, it is impossible for the new phenomena to emerge. Hence, 12 no fundamentally new subjective idea which needs a new subjective 13 form for its realization is possi­ ­ble. The old art system is completely 14 exhausted and ­there are no premises yet for the emergence of the 15 new one. We must remember that artists have nothing left but to find 16 courage in themselves to claim their rights to a subjective view of the 17 world, to an “object,” to a hope that their “object” ­will come back. Un- 18 fortunately, con­temporary art of the ex-­Soviet countries is doomed to 19 stay at the end of the list ­because ­today con­temporary Western artists 20 are backed up by the new and power­ful technologies, a developed in- 21 frastructure of culture and art, and substantial financial investments. 22 The nodal points would remain the same—­the anthropological 23 points, the ­human being and ­human agency. The strategies would 24 vary. The heroes would be both individual and collective. It is hard for 25 me to define who the most impor­tant artists are for the understand- 26 ing of the post-­Soviet ­human condition. I rather prefer the intellec- 27 tual curators who are able to identify the social and po­liti­cal sores and 28 choose from a mass of proj­ects, the most topical artistic works that 29 discuss the urgent prob­lems of society, in order to bring them tactfully 30 together into a large multimedia orchestra and represent this multi- 31 media symphony to the audiences. Viktor Misiano is one of them. 32 As for the neoco­ ­lo­nial mimicking styles and repetition of some- 33 one ­else’s ideas, the con­temporary art movement in Central Asia, 34 which receives enough Western grants, definitely looks derivative 35 and second-­rate if not third-­rate in comparison with Western art. It 36 is its pseudo-­copy. But no one seems to be preoccupied with this. 37 The new heroes of con­temporary art first attempted to exploit the 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 93 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ethnographic effect—­their national features sprinkled with ste­reo­ 2 typical depictions of the post-Soviet­ social life. This dish was served hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 to the Western audience as a substitute for real action. But a new time hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 has come and demanded to discard this ersatz and copying, for the hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 sake of real art, thus proving the poor judgment of Central Asian hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 con­temporary artists who hastily mended their worn-­out orien- 7 tal clothes to make them look more like Western fashions. Ridicu­ 8 lous rags a lá dervish, supposedly liberated cynical nomadism, low 9 taste buffoonery—­allowed the capricious and slippery West to look 10 at Central Asian con­temporary artists with sarcasm as if they wer­ e 11 some curious mimicking creatures speaking an incoherent language, 12 and thoughtlessly imitating someone ­else’s gestures. 13 The arbitrary appropriation of aesthetic practices and ele­ments of 14 language—­not only intensified the prob­lem of identity (without an 15 identity rooted in the native culture one cannot hope find any interest 16 or understanding in the world) but also exposed the neoco­ ­lo­nial­ist 17 politics—­the ubiquitous Western cultural expansion. It is not ­really 18 clear what is better—­the Uzbek pragmatic apathy or the post-­Soviet 19 Asian third-­rate pseudo-­copies and an urge to prove one’s otherness by 20 any means, for instance, by appropriating someone else’­ s experience 21 in the hope of being accepted. The artist has been taken to the level 22 of expandable material and the third-rate­ imitating époque has stimu- 23 lated a new artistic system. It continues to represent itself as socially 24 concerned art, but in reality­ an active export of postmodernist copies 25 has long become an indicative feature of cultural neo­co­lo­nial­ism. 26 Now let me say a few words on the Socialist modernism. In the 1970s 27 a number of critically minded artists deci­ded to destroy the habitual 28 order and combine the communist ideological artistic paradigm with 29 the modernist creation of new forms that is to synthesize the Socialist 30 realism and the modernist discourse. It was a bold attempt to create an 31 artistic trend of Socialist modernism as a combination of the aestheti- 32 cally politicized Soviet and Western art and thus pull the canonized 33 and exhausted Socialist realism out of its stagnation. It was necessary 34 to create a new avant-­guard real­ity in new artistic gestures, languages 35 and forms. The question arose: what methods, forms and meanings 36 ­were to be used to deideologize the Soviet art? Gradually out of smaller 37 movements the general concept of Socialist modernism started to 38 emerge. The name itself was uneasy: “Socialist” did not go together

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 94 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF fig. 4.2 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Vyacheslav 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Akhunov, АВС 3 (The Alphabet of hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 Totalitarianism) hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th (­There is no higher 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th honor in the Soviet 6 Union than to 7 receive an approval 8 from Stalin). 1976. 9 Paper, watercolor, 10 61 cm × 39 cm. Courtesy of the 11 artist. 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 with “modernism” very well. But it was enough to remember Kazimir 26 Malevich’s work The Red Horse­men or [Vladimir] Tatlin’s Tower as the 27 premises for the emergence of the socialist modernism. Undoubtedly 28 it was all about deideologization (deconceptualization) of everything­ 29 that was considered in the USSR to be sacred, untouchable, pertaining 30 to the party and the ruling ideology. It became necessary to reform the 31 very nature of Socialist realism and its practices, to work for the emer- 32 gence in the Soviet art of a new type of artistic experience and thinking. 33 Back in the ’70s, I ­imagined socialist modernism as an overcom- 34 ing of the Soviet ideological limitations in art. I saw it as a trend 35 which borrowed the Western artistic languages and techniques in 36 combination with socialist realism. Socialist modernism could adopt 37 what was created by the socialist realists, but changes the accents 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 95 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and the ideological contexts, removing the basis of the communist 2 ideology. I assumed that the artistic language of socialist modern- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 ism would be ­shaped through commentaries, analytical judgments, hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 paradoxical statements, interpretations, and critical views of both hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 the socialist realist method and the modernist art movements. So- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 cialist modernism could be a reconsideration of all the established 7 norms of socialist realism. It was a reaction to the present­ situation 8 in socialist realism and modernism, in both of which ­there was no 9 space for any innovation—­every­thing that could be said had been 10 already expressed and archived. Socialist modernism was to erode 11 the bound­aries between the hostile ideologies of the two struggling 12 po­liti­cal and economic systems, each with its own artistic territories 13 and languages. Socialist modernism, then could become the final 14 stage in the development of socialist realism in the form of its nega- 15 tion and a possibility for the continuation of the history of Soviet art. 16 tlostanova: What is in your opinion the role of con­temporary art 17 in building the civil society in the post-­Soviet repressive regimes? 18 When any adequate opposition to power is lacking, when the social 19 theoretical models tend to be weak and borrowed from someone 20 ­else’s sources (as coloniality of thinking infects social theorists much 21 more than artists), can an artist or some creative activist community 22 play any vis­i­ble po­liti­cal role and produce any meanings and affects 23 emancipating our consciousness? Could they perhaps use the fact 24 that any artistic utterance is meta­phorical by definition and hence is 25 able to quickly and more accurately grasp the Zeitgeist, the change 26 of the imaginary, and is still able to escape from censorship? In what 27 forms can art more effectively exist ­today as a po­liti­cal utterance? 28 29 akhunov: If we look at the emergence of contemporar­ y art in Uz- 30 bekistan and wider, in the post-­Soviet Central Asia, we would have to 31 admit that it is almost nonex­ ­is­tent. The first Uzbek exhibition of con­ 32 temporary art opened in 2005. It was called Constellation and or­ga­ 33 nized with the financial support of the wissS Bureau for the Collabo- 34 ration in Culture and Art. The exhibition was closed three days ­after 35 the opening. The same year they closed the public nongovernmental 36 Center for the New Art that I officially founded two years before. In 37 2010 the group of young Uzbek artists who wer­ e my pupils and used to 38 regularly come to my workshop, wer­ e called to their respective bosses

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 96 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 and warned by the unknown ­people that Akhunov is an American spy hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and if they ­were to be seen again next to me they would lose their job 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and would never find another one. They had to make their choice. 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th On my initiative a group of young, enthusiastic students con- 4 ducted a poll at the Uzbek National Art Institute. The ­future artists 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and the young graduates­ of the same institute between eighteen­ 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and twenty five years of agewer­ e asked what part was played by the 7 con­temporary art in the life of our country and if it could act as a 8 ­catalyst, contributing to the development of the post-Soviet­ Uzbek 9 society. The results of this poll ­were published in the book Winter: 10 Poetics and Politics (Vishmidt et al 2013), which was a part of the Cen- 11 tral Asian pavilion proj­ect at the 55th Venice Biennale. The answers 12 ­were predictable, yet still quite shocking. 13 14 1. Art is: 15 (a) Art for art’s sake—­a creative experiment and a discovery 16 of the new artistic forms. 17 50%—­yes, 50%—­no 18 (b) A commercial endeavor whose goal is to sell the artistic 19 product. 20 80%—­yes, 20%—­no 21 (c) A social-­political movement with the artist as an activist 22 whose goal is revolutionary changes and overcoming of 23 social alienation. 24 10%—­yes, 90%—­no 25 2. Does the con­temporary art of Uzbekistan meet your 26 expectations? 27 10%—­yes, 90%—­no 28 3. Have you ever encountered at exhibitions works by Uzbek art- 29 ists that reflect social and po­liti­cal themes? 30 100%—­no 31 4. Is it necessary to introduce the history of modernism into art 32 college curricula? 33 40%—­yes, 60%—­no 34 5. Should teachers at art schools and colleges warn their stu- 35 dents against any penchant for con­temporary art, thus caus- 36 ing them to have negative opinions of this art? 37 50%—­yes, 50%—­no 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 97 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6. Does Uzbek art need private galleries in­de­pen­dent from the 2 state? hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 40%—­yes, 60%—­no hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 At the same time, the state holds the International Biennial of Con­ hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 temporary Art in Tashkent. Yet we have no private, inde­ ­pen­dent or hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 state galleries which would specialize in the repre­sen­ta­tion and pro- 7 motion of con­temporary art and would be interested in the training of 8 specialists in this area. The local organizers of the large proj­ects often 9 have no idea of the processes­ taking place in contemporar­ y art which 10 means that there­ are still no premises for organizing­ any large events 11 such as international artistic forums. All of the previous biennials of 12 con­temporary art in Tashkent had been just a formality as the regime 13 appointed its art bureaucrats to the key positions and they acted as cen- 14 sors immediately banning all critical works. It is not even the question 15 of wasting the state bud­get, but more the unbelievable unprofessional- 16 ism and lack of adequate specialists in the area of large international art 17 proj­ects and most importantly, the total ideological control of the state. 18 The bureaucrats do not care why there­ is no dialogue between our 19 local artists and the latest trends in contemporar­ y art worldwide, or 20 how one looks for new artistic languages. Due to the curators’ low 21 professionalism, any communication turns to be a mere semblance 22 and, as a result, a failure. Ther­ e are no curatorial strategies; the cura- 23 tors are not able to clearly formulate any original ideas. It would be in­ 24 ter­est­ing to create each time a new exhibition structure and elaborate 25 a new tactic, making it possi­ ­ble to improvise and overcome the nar- 26 row disciplinary barriers and take into account the historical and cul- 27 tural conditions of our country. The local would-be curators are only 28 schematically copying illustrations from the cata­logues, journals and 29 internet sites of the existing international forums to which they have 30 never been invited and hence could not possibly gain any first-­hand 31 experience. In the end the imitation of knowledge and experience 32 leads to a parody instead of a ­wholesome and successful major Cen- 33 tral Asian international art forum. The lack of professionalism on 34 the curators’ part does not bother the bureaucrats who take the final 35 decision on the organ­ization of such proj­ects. They do not care if it 36 ­were a real art event or a low quality simulation. What they do care 37 about is that ­under their wise supervision one more con­temporary art 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 98 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 forum took place, the prizes ­were quietly and eventlessly awarded, hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th the guests ­were massively chapanized and taken sightseeing in Sa- 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th markand,2 the organizers praised themselves in the local media and 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th now can safely report to their bosses that it was a successful event. 4 Often artists complain about persecutions of any inde­ ­pen­dent 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ­initiatives by the authorities who fear the artists’ unorthodox inter- 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th pretations opposed to the official legitimized line in art and in politics. 7 Yet, paradoxically, ­these artists almost never attempt to do an in­de­ 8 pen­dent work. They complain about financial difficulties, bans and 9 consequently, their worry of being left with no sustenance, their fear 10 for their own and their family’s­ lives and well-being.­ Such arguments 11 are grounded in fear—­a fear of being repressed! At the same time 12 ­these same ­people are ready to be commissioned to do the poorly 13 paid ideological state works risking to be mocked by censors, artistic 14 ­unions and bureaucrats. 15 It means that ­after gaining in­de­pen­dence the country still re­ 16 creates the same politics of vio­lence and suppression which Moscow 17 successfully used in relation to its colonial peripheries. But today­ it 18 is the local po­liti­cal elite which uses the same methods of colonial 19 vio­lence against any efforts at liberalization of our society. Let us call 20 it an internal colonization. The authoritarian power is a pack of in- 21 ternal colonizers who are profiting from the ­peoples’ ignorance and 22 especially their ignorance of liberal values. Consequently, all the ef- 23 forts to legitimize the real contemporar­ y art are always nipped in the 24 bud. Historically Tashkent has never had any underground or other 25 forms of protest art such as mobile artistic communities, and anyone 26 involved in art sphere is scared to death to be persecuted by the state. 27 As for creative forms of con­temporary art as a po­liti­cal utterance, 28 I would assume that any forms would do if in­ter­est­ing and creative 29 ideas are put in their basis, if they use an unusual optic and develop 30 unconventional interpretations. Yet the most effective, topical and 31 adamant of all genres for me are per­for­mance, actionism, happening, 32 which include the ­whole specter of multidisciplinary actions (­music, 33 fiction, poetry, theater, cinema, video, dance, declamation, ­etcetera), 34 in short, the art of action. 35 36 tlostanova: Your artwork has long been known and appreciated 37 in the world. Your works are exhibited in the West and in the East 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 99 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th at the most prestigious professional forums. And this is wonderful 2 that you are appreciated even if sometimes you cannot even attend hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 your own exhibitions ­because you are not granted an exit visa from hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 Uzbekistan. Yet a number of artists from the post-Soviet­ space and hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 particularly ­those from the Caucasus and Central Asia experience hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 some Orientalist déjà vue, which is expressed in the exoticization 7 and commercialization of their art and of themselves as some neo­co­ 8 lo­nial goods in the context of contemporar­ y global art. Do you feel 9 ­these negative sides of the global recognition? Or you have your own 10 ­recipe of how to avoid it? 11 akhunov: The ‘Socialist’ was crossed out from the formula “Social- 12 ist in its content, national in its form” and “cap­i­tal­ist” was put instead. 13 It is not only art products, but also purely commercial goods that are 14 often represented in national exotic garbs as playing the Orient. Ther­ e 15 is a ­simple goal ­behind it—to identify ourselves in the midst of medio- 16 cre art products as being dif­fer­ent and therefore, to attract attention 17 to what we are doing­ and to sell our works. It is no longer an appro- 18 priation or a repetition as such, but rather an exotic national wrap into 19 which the replications of Western works are often packaged. Usually it 20 is stressed that we are able to make everything­ just like the Westerners 21 do. Often when the Western grants stop to be poured into the post-­ 22 Soviet republics, the artists’ initiative also dries out, and it becomes 23 impossible to find anyone working in con­temporary art, as it happened 24 in Kazakhstan. International art forums, which for a long time have 25 acted as centers and targets of art-nomadism­ and as a part of the global 26 tourist business, let the world discover the unknown exotic va­ri­e­ties of 27 con­temporary art from the third world countries. 28 In 2007 in London I conducted a number of actions around the 29 question of why the artists from the third world are confined to 30 the role of props or exotic exhibits which must serve as a garnish 31 to the programs created by the artists from the developed countries. I 32 was cleaning with a toothbrush and shampoo, the tiles of the yard of 33 the Royal Acad­emy of Arts and the work of German artist Kifferexhib- 34 ited in that yard, the columns and stairs of the National Art Museum 35 and the lions at the Trafalgar Square, the metal details and the décor 36 of the royal palace,the stairs of the old and new Tate Gallery buildings, 37 and even the stuffed animals at private apartments Cleaner( , 2007). 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 100 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 The feeling of being fastened to this or that exhibition as an exotic hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th object was persisting ­until the Istanbul biennial of the 2009 where they 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th exhibited seven of my proj­ects consisting of over eighty works. Only 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th the dead artists are usually honored that way. ­After Istanbul ­there was 4 a number of serious exhibitions, several museums bought my works 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and as a result, I was invited to take part in the famous Documenta 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 13 in Kassel, in exhibitions at the New Museum in New York, in the 7 Pompidou Centre in Paris and at the Queen Sofia Museum in Madrid. 8 But why is it so? The reason for my recognition is that I work with 9 the Soviet identity in continuation of my series from the nineteen 10 seventies and within socialist modernism that we discussed earlier. 11 This refers to the Red Mantras of the USSR, The Red Party Line, to 12 my Leniniana, the Art-­Cheology of the USSR, to the Doubt, Procrustean 13 Bed of Marxism-Leninism­ and a dozen ­others. The artistic foundations 14 ­were laid in the legendary times. Still, I had to prove my professional 15 suitability anew by means of my con­temporary proj­ects. 16 ­Today I can choose my proj­ects according to the “­under doubt” 17 princi­ple. To put something under­ doubt means to discuss the alarm- 18 ing sense of historical repetition and insularity, the historical vac- 19 uum marked by a lack of events, by stagnation, and also, to reflect 20 on my own works, my own feelings that I put under­ doubt. In the 21 conditions of exhausted forms which have led to the impossibility of 22 re-­inscribing the signs (as new forms), the very doubt as a medium 23 of all other mediums is doubted. Maybe this is my recipe­ to avoid 24 the negative sides of the global recognition: to put every­thing which 25 used to happen and which is going­ on now, and first of all, to put ym - 26 self and my existence, ­under scrutiny. To doubt every­thing I do. My 27 personal exhibition, which is now in the making ­will be curated by 28 Viktor Misiano (who ­will also write one of the catalogue­ texts along 29 with Boris Groys) and ­will be called “­Under Doubt.”3 30 31 tlostanova: A quarter of a century­ has passed after­ the collapse 32 of the USSR and ­there is an opinion that the Soviet legacy is already 33 over and it is time to museumize it even for ­those of us who ­were 34 ­shaped within its tight embrace and often in spite of it. On the other 35 hand, the lacking self-­reflection,the missing repentance or any work 36 with cultural and historical complexes, traumas and memories, leads 37 to a never ending wandering in circles, to falling over into the same 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 101 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 fig. 4.3 Vyacheslav Akhunov, You Are Following the Correct Road, Comrades (Lenin’s 18 plan of monumental propaganda). 1982. Paper, serial print, pencil, 40 cm × 29.5 cm. From the Desert of Oblivion series. Courtesy of the artist. 19 20 trap again and again, to a revival of the most dangerous imperial/ 21 Soviet ressentiment, for instance, in Russia.­ How has the trajectory of 22 your own artistic priorities, interests, and leitmotivs changed in the 23 last twenty five years? What have you lost and gained as an artist? 24 What do you find impor­tant ­today and tomorrow? 25 26 akhunov: Igor Savitsky acquired forty five of my works—­two can- 27 vases and some graphics, for his famous collection in Nukus4. This 28 happened in the fall of 1980 about a year after­ I graduated from the Su- 29 rikov State Academic Institute. In 1977 the Tretyakov gallery bought 30 four of my canvases for its collection. In 1989 ­after my trip to the 31 United States and visits of many con­temporary art museums, I told 32 myself: “Every­thing has been already discovered, every­thing has been 33 done before me.” I had not realized then that I was ­doing something 34 impor­tant, unique and unlike anyone else,­ that somehow I managed 35 to rethink the modernist discourse and formulate my own under- 36 standing of what I was doing­ and what other nonconformist artists 37 in the USSR ­were also ­doing then—­socialist modernism. For me, the 38 strug­gle with the regime was taking a playful form. I did it with the

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 102 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 help of art, but it was a dangerous and even deadly game, I was inter- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th rogated by the kgband my life was ­under constant surveillance. 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ­After perestroika, when the bans ­were lifted and the empire col- 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th lapsed I lost any interest in the game and in 1990 I packed all my 4 works into boxes and suitcases and shelved them for twenty years. 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Instead of that I started working in the cinema and attempted to 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th learn how to make video art. I worked with film director Ali Kham- 7 rayev on the filmsTamerlane and Chenghis Khan at an Italian cinema 8 com­pany, I visited Cinecittà Studios in Rome, Mosfilm, Sverdlovsk 9 Cinema Com­pany. I spent some time in Germany, England,­ and 10 other places in Europe—in short, I was learning and working. My 11 first three video art workswer­ e demonstrated publicly at the Tash- 12 kent exhibition Constellation in 2005. But before that there­ ­were 13 several unofficial apartment screenings and experiments, efforts to 14 assem­ble the video materials with the use of two video recorders, 15 conceptual drawing series, inspired by the 1970s–80s works of Nam 16 June Paik. Si­mul­ta­neously, I started writing fiction texts more con- 17 sistently than before. I worked on scripts, novels, and even poems. I 18 have written two novels—­The Foundling and the Uzbek Transit about 19 the life of guest workers. Generally, I was engaged in things­ that had 20 nothing to do with paints, varnish and thinners until­ I heard of con­ 21 temporary art movements in Kazakhstan and Kirghizia. In the late 22 1990s I realized that the Uzbek society was in a worse situation than 23 in the USSR and my interest in the game whose rules wer­ e becoming 24 stricter ­every year, was revived. 25 In 2000 I was invited to take part in the first Central Asian fes- 26 tival of contemporar­ y art in Almaty, but I have participated in con­ 27 temporary art forums in the Soviet years as well. For instance, I took 28 part in the Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh in 1987, where I won a 29 prize. In Almaty together with the felt artist Burbukan Borubayeva 30 (Bishkek), we made a sixteen meter installation based on my design. 31 It was made of felt, sand and clay and called The Desert of Oblivion. 32 Quicksand. The work was awarded a ­grand prix at the festival, and 33 this is how I came back to con­temporary art. 34 To share my experience with younger artists I initiated an officially 35 registered nongovernmental Center for the New Art. Visual-­plastic 36 anthropology. In two years the National Security Ser­vice closed it as a 37 hostile to the state line in the arts. 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 103 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th The 1970s–80s me wer­ e a period of total isolation, mostly under­ 2 ground, hermetic, with a theoretical bent. Ther­ e ­were simply no non- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 conformist artists, writers or film directors in Central Asia. The sec- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 ond period starting from the late 1990s and ­until now can be defined hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 as an implementation of my theoretical ideas into practice. I mean hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 my theoretical experience of a multimedia artist of the eighties that I 7 managed to transfer in the nineties into the practical sphere, when I 8 had a chance to make installations, video art, perfor­ ­mances, actions, 9 sculptures, and photo-projects­ , focusing on the social and politi­ ­cal 10 prob­lems and actively criticizing the regime. In a way, I was the pio- 11 neer of multimedia art in Central Asia and Uzbekistan. Besides, in the 12 local art situation, I was the founder and pop­u­lar­izer of con­temporary 13 art and it is first of all as an artist that I managed to gain at least some 14 personal freedom in this deadening totalitarian state. When the cura- 15 tors of the Istanbul Biennial of Con­temporary Art came to Tashkent 16 in 2009, my suitcases ­were reopened and the archives ­were fi­nally 17 shown. Immediately ­after that I was invited to display my works in 18 Berlin, in Tanas gallery and at the Istanbul Biennial where my success 19 was celebrated by the exiled Uzbek politi­ ­cal opposition presided by 20 Muhammad Salikh.5 ­After that encounter I was always rejected the 21 exit visas whenever I applied for one. I have become a hostage. 22 ­Today, tomorrow as well as yesterday it has been always impor­tant 23 for me to remain in the interstice. On the one hand, it allows seeing 24 the pragmatics of the demonized technological pro­cess of the attrac- 25 tion art époque which is oriented ­toward the consumers’ mass tastes 26 when technologies usurp the space of the transcendental subject and 27 the ­human being is replaced with its technological double. Then a 28 realistic depiction (let us say of a flower) is mingling and hybridiz- 29 ing with a computer interface, a multimedia frame, or a technologi- 30 cal pro­cess. On the other hand, we deal with the all-­encompassing 31 repre­sen­ta­tion of the nonaccountable appropriation and the simula- 32 tive devices of the distorted represen­ ­ta­tion of real­ity borrowed from 33 mass-­media, the domination of simulacra, the advertising commer- 34 cial tricks and the po­liti­cal engagement of art. In the narrow inter- 35 stice between ­these two extremes the social and po­liti­cal art and the 36 topical culture exist. And the interstice lets in only the initiated ones. 37 For ­others the place is at the extremes. 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 104 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 CHAPTER FIVE 12 13 14 15 Reflecting on Time, Space, 16 and Memory with Afanassy Mamedov 17 18 19 20 21 Afanassy Mamedov is one of the very few Russophone writers who fully 22 embody the postcolonial and the postsocialist human­ condition. The in- 23 tersection of postcolonialism and postsocialism has not yet received any 24 serious critical reflection in usR sia­ and is not even admitted to be a legiti- 25 mate topic of discourse by the majority of the critical establishment. They 26 often assume that both postcolonial and postsocialist studies are imported 27 and imposed from abroad. . Mamedov has Azeri and Jewish roots. Born in 28 Baku, the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan, Mamedov moved to Moscow as a 29 young man; as a successful journalist and winner of many Russian­ liter- 30 ary prizes, as well as an editor of the Jewish journal L’сhaim, Mamedov 31 is one of the very few people­ writing in contemporar­ y Rus­sian language 32 prose which is attuned to the global tendencies of transculturation, cul- 33 tural and linguistic creolization, playful negotiation of the global and the 34 local, trickster-­shifting identifications, and nostalgic spatial memories of 35 non-­Russian post-­Soviet multicultural cities. What follows is an excerpt 36 from a longer interview I conducted with Mamedov on the nature of 37 38

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 105 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ­fiction and on the post-Soviet­ unhomed writers who infinitely linger be- 2 tween vari­ous worlds and times. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th madina tlostanova: I first got acquainted with your work in 2000. 4 And since then for me the most in­ter­est­ing aspect of your fiction has hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 been the embodiment of transcultural space in your texts, how it on hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 the one hand, expresses the picturesque and palpable materiality of 7 this world and on the other, acts as a reservoir of many histories. 8 In my view, space in your works, often takes over time, space con- 9 quers time. Similar things­ happen in the famous Southern novel in 10 the United States (Faulkner and Carson McCullers among ­others), as 11 well as in a number of postcolonial works, such as Salman Rushdie’s 12 and V. S. Naipaul’s. But you have your own always recognizable way 13 of representing spatial histories. How would you define the sense of 14 place in fiction in general and in your own works? Does the­ recipe of 15 spatial-­temporal correlation and interaction change from one work 16 to another? 17 18 afanassy mamedov: Yes and no. The basis/carcass remains the 19 same or almost the same. It all depends on how much you change 20 yourself. Alexander Blok said that the author’s style is a constant, in- 21 variable dimension ­because in order to change his style the author 22 himself would have to alter completely. Other­wise, it is not a style 23 but just a simulation. I have trusted Blok for many years, yet ­today 24 I am almost sure that any author can change beyond recognition two 25 or three times in his life. And the “sense of place,” the “played out 26 past” together with the “open space” of the future­ , play an impor­tant 27 role in this uncontrollable pro­cess. 28 The sense of place depends on preferences, on what are we 29 dreaming about and how deep was our sleep when we woke up . . . ​ 30 No ­matter how we cut our routes, no matter­ how we hurry up or 31 slow down, we always arrive at the same time and at the same point 32 with all our characters. They are also, by the way, subject to changes, 33 provided that their emergence in our text was determined not only 34 by the main story line but also by the suggestiveness of the text. 35 You know, it often seems to us that we, the writers,are smarter 36 than the text, written and published, but it is not always so. It often 37 happens that the resulting text turns out to be much cleverer, much 38 more significant and wonderful than its authors, and this paradoxical

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 106 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 divergence may last for years. It refers particularly to ­those writers hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th who create their texts in the conditions of partial or complete libera- 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th tion from the moment of cognition, to use a Zen-Buddhist­ meta­phor. 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th I think that my characteristic style is connected not as much with the 4 quest for such a style or its conscious building (I am always catch- 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th ing up with my own texts), as with my place of birth—­Baku, Second 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Parallel Street 20/67, apartment 37, and with my date of birth—1960, 7 the time of the thaw, and with the ­family—­a Jewish Azeri ­family, 8 with its own multilayered history. . . . 9 I am not the first scriptor/writer in this­family. A partiality to writ- 10 ing sat deeply in our genes, but also the karmic debt of my grand­ 11 father and father­ and other writing relatives that I inherited. All of 12 this was not defininguntil ­ the moment when I defined myself. My 13 choice depended on many things,­ including the endless series of 14 hobbies. They ­shaped me as a person of the Abrahamic triangle with 15 some Zen ele­ments. 16 It is easier for me to answer your question if I tell you about my 17 literary preferences. When I was young in contrast with my peers 18 who ­were keen on fantasy, mystery stories, historical and adventure 19 novels I read a lot of “boring” Russian­ classical lit­er­a­ture. And from 20 very early on looked at the Caucasus, where I was born and grew up 21 with the eyes of a “colonist,” “someone who arrived from elsewhere.” 22 Ideally, this look was from above, except for the fact that it was fake, 23 it was a mask. And this prevented me from properly taking off. ­Later 24 the mask became my second nature and I started to fi­nally climb, but 25 that happened already in Moscow. 26 27 tlostanova: When did you move to Moscow? What ­were the rea- 28 sons for your departure? 29 mamedov: I left for Moscow in 1985 for many reasons, most of which 30 can be described as personal. But then it seemed to me that I simply 31 outgrew my city. I was protecting myself from the miseries of life 32 with the help of the symbolists and the Russian­ Silver age lit­er­a­ture. 33 I was saving myself with Nabokov’s and Gazdanov’s prose. In the Rus­ 34 sian lit­er­a­ture divided ­after the October revolt I definitely preferred 35 the immigrant part. It was so full of tension, drama, apocalyptic ex- 36 perience which none of the other national liter­ ­a­tures can offer, in my 37 view. The Literary Institute1 also played an impor­tant part in shaping 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 107 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th me as an individual and as an artist. The 1990s ­were not just the years 2 of freedom; we tested our strength with this freedom. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th tlostanova: Twentieth-­century writers from countries and re- 4 gions which went through the traumatic experience of wars, genocide, hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 exile, colonization, dictatorship, totalitarian regimes, have developed hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 in response par­tic­u­lar recurrent and recognizable aesthetic and po- 7 etological forms, genres, and devices. This is how emerged the Eastern 8 Eu­ro­pean protest fiction, the German tradition of reckoning with the 9 past ­after World War II, the post-­dictatorship fiction in a number of 10 Latin American countries and certainly the postcolonial novel as an 11 international phenomenon. Yet it seems that the postsocialist space 12 has not managed in the last twenty five years (since the collapse of 13 the USSR) to come up with its own model or even realize its own dif- 14 ference in poetics, in the set of devices, and the optics for seeing the 15 world. It does not mean of course that all of ­these ele­ments do not 16 exist. It is just that they exist in some not entirely reflected upon, not 17 fully realized form. And part of the reason, as I see it, is the unwilling- 18 ness of the rest of the world and its aesthetic establishment to admit 19 the presence of such a distinct post-­Soviet model of fiction and art. 20 The only works that have found a mass recognition in the rest of the 21 world are the straightforward politi­ ­cal illustrations and commercial- 22 ized nostalgia. Is ­there such a ­thing as thpost-­Soviet fiction, in your 23 opinion, as a separate school, modality or genre? Does it have a future­ 24 or it is ­going to dis­appear or become something ­else very soon? 25 26 mamedov: Post-Soviet­ fictiondefinitely does not exist as a school 27 or as a trend. I agree with you ­here. As a modality, it does not exist 28 ­either it seems. We used to be a country of fresh newspapers, and 29 now we are a country of fresh books. Our lit­er­a­ture is most prob­ably 30 a lit­er­a­ture of islands in the sea, which does not make it less valu- 31 able by the way. Why is it so? I think ­there are no leaders left in this 32 fiction. No irrefutable leaders. Andthose­ who used to be or are as- 33 signed to be leaders, usually from above, and by those­ publishers who 34 publish ­these writers “a novel a year.”.. These­ are big publishers who 35 are certain that the trouble-proof­ functioning of their business can 36 indeed influence the literary processes,­ ­because for the bosses con­ 37 temporary lit­er­a­ture is a process­ and a quite controllable process­ at 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 108 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 that (business, nothing personal). But they forget one Taoist truth: hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th “­Things often grow when someone is trying to diminish them and 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th shrink when someone attempts to exalt them.” This works for ­people 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th as well. Another impor­tant ­thing is how our selected intelligent­sia be- 4 haved ­after 1991. What the kgb has not managed to do was done by 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th the ordinary snickers bar . . . ​In short, the writers swallowed the bait 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th of the Western material abundance . . . 7 It is pos­si­ble that for the post-­Soviet fiction to become a school 8 and a modality, as we would like it to happen, what is needed is a 9 cumbersome po­liti­cal event, some impor­tant milestone, a mark in the 10 history of our country. Maybe we are coming closer to such an event 11 now, I mean what is happening in the world and what position Rus­ 12 sia has taken in relation to the West. 13 You ask if the post-­Soviet fictionis ­going to dissolve with time. I do 14 not think so. We have no choice, we cannot juxtapose to it, so to say, 15 an unofficial post-Soviet­ lit­er­a­ture, ­because in the last years we have 16 not managed to create such a counter-­cultural phenomenon, ­there 17 was simply no need for it. No one was banned; every­one who wanted 18 to be heard—fr­ om ­here and from there­ —­could be published. Can it 19 become dif­fer­ent? When it happens thepost-­Soviet fiction ­will stop 20 being itself, which maybe both of us ­will celebrate. ­Because at the 21 moment when it happens, a real post-­Soviet fiction would emerge in- 22 stead of a clumsy corporate product in the troubled minds of always 23 hurrying literary critics. And then it ­will be pos­si­ble to study it and 24 find its leaders asking the question of who should be allowed in this 25 lit­er­a­ture and who should be left out. 26 But I am ­really answering your question from the end, it would be 27 more appropriate to start from the fact that it is necessary to define 28 the temporal frames without which we ­will not understand what is 29 included into the concept of post-­Soviet lit­er­a­ture. It would be con­ 30 ve­nient to think that it starts after­ the collapse of the USSR, but I 31 think that the count should begin two-­three years before. I would 32 offer 1989 as the starting date. And also I would not waituntil ­ this 33 fiction dies in agony and would sentence it to its end before. I believe 34 that it happened in 2003–2004. After­ that a dif­fer­ent sort of fiction 35 emerges which you have just mentioned. But many people­ simply 36 did not notice its originating moment. This means that the temporal 37 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 109 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th frame of the post-Soviet­ fiction has been just the past ten or twelve 2 years, and maybe even less. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 Now when we have defined the temporal frames we should think hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 of what authors we could include—­all ­those writing in Rus­sian in hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 dif­fer­ent parts of the world, or only Russian­ Federation, or the Com- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 monwealth of In­de­pen­dent States? If we are stricter about the term 7 “post-­Soviet,” then we should include only the authors who used to 8 live and write in the ex-Soviet­ space, but I would shun from this. In any 9 case this is none of my business to decide whom to let in and whom to 10 throw out, whom to call a general, and whom to bury in a mass grave as 11 a brave lance-­corporal. This is the task of in­de­pen­dent experts and they 12 are to decide. I feel somehow the imperfection of the concept “postso- 13 viet fiction” which used to be con­ve­nient up to a certain moment. 14 tlostanova: Many of your readers are attracted, even mesmerized, 15 with the images of Baku and Moscow, of many foreign towns and cit- 16 ies which you visited and whose spirit you are subtly recreating, for 17 example, in the fragmentary Absheron Chronicles—a­ book quite un- 18 conventional in the genre and narrative sense. In fiction space, and 19 especially urban space which is highly man-­made, is entirely unreal, 20 utterly subjective; it capriciously changes ­under the influence of our 21 moods and our wishes, but also has its own ­will and nature. When a 22 writer comes into such a space and starts playing with topos (from 23 Greek —­space as location), strange ­things happen. I could not 24 τόπος help feeling that your spatial portraits are not photographs­ , not docu- 25 ments, but rather paintings, so to say, that is a highly ­imagined topos 26 of Baku, Moscow, Istanbul, Germany, or the Maghreb. Gradually 27 from work to work ­there emerges a complex community of charac- 28 ters, families, friends migrating from one story or novel to another. It 29 is a certain saga not unlike Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha—with­ its own 30 carefully striated and lovingly mapped world, so deceivingly real and 31 at the same time, ­imagined. What is the ­recipe of such an artistic real­ 32 ity? How real or ­imagined is it? Or maybe similarly to Vladimir Nabo- 33 kov, you do not believe in reality­ without quotation marks and you add 34 into your texts only the very necessary modicum of such mediocre 35 real­ity in order to fool the reader who is looking for realism and plausi- 36 bility? Such a hapless reader ­will encounter in the pages of your books 37 the real streets, places, and names—­Shemakhinka, Parallel streets, 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 110 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 Seaside Boulevard, Tverskaya street with many side streets around hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th the Patriarch Ponds in Moscow. But all of these­ are stylized spaces, 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th the optics of their repre­sen­ta­tion is recognizably yours and they are 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th always marked with a spatial confusion, a phantasmagoric trace, an 4 ele­ment of detachment and estrangement making the familiar look 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th unpredictable. Already in your first works I was stricken by this hy- 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th bridity, this overlapping of dif­fer­ent spaces, this very specific depth. 7 And now it seems that this ele­ment has intensified. 8 More and more often spaces become openly fantastic, mystical 9 and esoteric as in a number of your recent works populated by trick- 10 ster characters who are undergoing various­ metamorphoses. What 11 sort of signs are ­those? Can we interpret them as an impossibility of 12 finding a way out in this world? Or is it a peculiar version of the old 13 Bakhtin’s road chronotope which we find in the medieval romance 14 and in the picaresque novel? In your case the road chronotope was 15 first realized as nostalgia for Baku and the adventures of a stranger 16 in Moscow. But now more and more often it is a path through the 17 looking glass, into other realities, into the twilight esoteric worlds, 18 into yoga and martial arts as a philosophy of life. Why such a shift? 19 20 mamedov: I am glad you remembered the Absheron Chronicles. It 21 is a border work; it sort of ends a long period in my life. It sums up 22 the époque of Frau Shram. I was writing that novel in the state of 23 being open to all winds and I did not care about anyone’s opinion, 24 but the Absheron Chronicles is a hermetic work even if it seems to be 25 light and readable. Working on it, I always kept in mind what would 26 ­people think of me. Ther­ e are certain moments in life when your 27 youth turns out to be wiser and brighter than “the age of wisdom.” 28 What made you ask about the esoteric and yoga worlds is probably­ 29 the triptych “When fire keeps ­water” and especially its last novelette 30 “Nargiz and Aramis.” This work is in many ways a test, I had to see if I 31 ­really can let the other reality­ into my/our world, if these­ two worlds 32 can coexist in my prose, what language should I use in certain nar- 33 rative moments, when both worlds are indistinguishable and one of 34 them overlaps with the other . . . ​This triptych was the foothold for 35 the short novel I am finishing now.2 ­There are ­great masters of such 36 prose from Kafka to Bulgakov; I needed to see if I can enter this liter- 37 ary territory, this literary regiment with my own face, what would 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 111 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th be the losses, if any. I could have written such prose earlier, but I 2 felt before that I have no right to do it and then, I very much nurtured hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 a healthy man in myself, a man firmly standing with his feet on the hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 ground and pretending that an “other real­ity” maybe exists, but is none hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 of my care. But as soon as this ground slipped from ­under my feet I felt hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 an urge to write differently, I got a feeling that I acquired that right. 7 My writing is connected with the road I once chose. This road as it 8 turns out, is linked with Buddhism, but not with traditional vari­ ­e­ties 9 such as ashrams, Indian, Chinese, Japanese,­ or Tibetan and not even 10 with the Buddhism pro­cessed by Albert Schweitzer or Teitaro Suzuki, 11 but rather with that Eastern fairy tale which Westerners in­ven­ted for 12 themselves. First of all I mean Salinger’s and Hesse’s Buddhism. For 13 them it was also a state of their soul, a longing for light, an immediate 14 and inexpressible state which is necessary to fix to be able to come 15 back to it and use it properly to save oneself. In this sense ­there is not 16 much difference between the core Buddhism and the ashram. Maybe 17 I am wrong, let us say, this is my feeling. I do not want to touch upon 18 theoretical or technical aspects, such as, for example, what is a halt in a 19 dialogue and how does it affect a soul prepared or not prepared by Bud- 20 dhism. Let us agree that our Buddhism is the Buddhism of intellectuals 21 and artists. You stepped out to the balcony to have a smoke and have 22 a cup of tea and found yourself in a dif­fer­ent ­century or millennium, 23 or even in a dif­fer­ent dimension, you understood something and got 24 back with no losses and this is already good. 25 But if on top of that you carefully extinguished your cigarette and 26 washed your cup without pushing anyone with your elbow or making 27 their life difficult with your cigarette smoke, then you are a hero, then 28 you understand what is Zen. The change of course was not induced 29 by me. I would feel much more comfortable living the way I lived and 30 writing the way I wrote before. But certain ­things happen in­de­pen­ 31 dently of our wishes, let us call them the twists of fate. They are such 32 “Finnegan’s wakes.” Good if you can disappear,­ hide in some sabbati- 33 cal. As a rule, there­ is no point in clinging to the past. You can only 34 hope for some assistance from the outside . . . 35 As for the real and ­imagined in my prose, I invent only ­those ­things 36 that—as Sergei Dovlatov would say—­imbue the narrative real­ity with 37 some degree of probability, every­thing ­else is redundant. So it is not 38 ­really a question of composition or form . . . ​I offered a sacrifice if you

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 112 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 wish and now I am responsible for it in my writings, and the rest of hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th it is not mine, I leave it to others­ with no regret. You said it very well 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and to the point when you mentioned real­ity in quotation marks. 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Someone ­else’s experience is this reality­ in inverted commas; one 4 can remove the commas only when it becomes one’s own experience. 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Initiation is, in fact, removing the quotation marks from real­ity, and 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th not just removing but also rocking this reality­ which may be danger- 7 ous at times. And maybe that is why one cannot be initiated at one’s 8 own ­will but only at the ­will of heaven, if you excuse my pathetic 9 tone. Maybe this is why real lit­er­a­ture has never heard of such bodies 10 as the Ministry of Culture and does not know anything about such 11 mind-­widening books as The 100 Best Con­temporary Authors. 12 13 tlostanova: You always create a second reality­ existing entirely in 14 your mind and in your whimsical memory. And it is about memory 15 that I would like to ask you. Liter­ ­a­ture as well as cinema is certainly 16 the art of memory. But its role can be quite dif­fer­ent. What is it in your 17 case? Is it a conservation of the past, nostalgia for the childhood 18 or an exorcism as an effort to get rid of the previous experience, 19 ­including the Soviet one? 20 mamedov: I think all of what you enumerated exists, but the ques- 21 tion is which of them dominates. I feel that I am the least preoccupied 22 with the liberation from the Soviet experience, if I understood you 23 correctly, and you implied ­here a po­liti­cal alignment affecting our 24 generation. You see, I have always been rather apoliti­ ­cal and now 25 even more so—­long live Fellini! And it ­will not be pos­si­ble to divide 26 the purely Soviet from the post-­Soviet, well, maybe only the lemon- 27 ade and caviar from the Sebastopol sparkling wine. 28 Indeed, I stopped conserving the past or being nostalgic about my 29 childhood. Flesh-­backs become less and less impor­tant in my writ- 30 ing. You are right, without the art of memory ­there is no art as such. 31 The question is what do you want to remember as an artist and as an 32 ordinary ­human being, how the former and the latter are positioned 33 inside yourself. It would be wonderful to get rid of the previous ex- 34 perience, especially if it wer­ e negative, but one has to be very careful 35 ­here ­because in the heat of liberation it is easy not to notice that 36 you started to liberate yourself from yourself. Not every­one and not 37 always is fit for Castaneda style cleanings. The­ human being is very 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 113 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th fragile, one cannot stop respecting oneself, or start refusing a mission 2 one was assigned, generally, or in a concrete period of one’s life—just­ hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 ­because one is tired or sick with it and wants to jump over several hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 steps in one’s subconscious. . . . ​If God needs to set you ­free of some hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 negative experience he would do it and it is not your task to decide hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 when. All you can do is to pour out some water­ from the overflow- 7 ing glass. I think when I am writing this is exactly what I am ­doing. 8 Maybe this is the main reason . . . 9 tlostanova: The space we have been discussing so far is also a 10 home, a certain anchor of the soul as Salman Rushdie once said. Yet 11 when ­there is no real, stable home—­and in ­today’s world, ­there are 12 more and more ­people who are in such an unhomed situation—­its 13 role can be performed by language. Let us talk a bit about the role of 14 language/languages in your works. What is the specificity of language 15 in con­temporary Russophone lit­er­a­ture written by multicultural au- 16 thors from the postsoviet space? I feel that so far their works often 17 fall out of the critics’ tunnel vision or are distorted in accordance 18 with some moth-­eaten Soviet formulas of the national in its form 19 and Socialist in its content (today­ it simply becomes just Russian­ in- 20 stead of Soviet). It is much more con­ve­nient to label the author as 21 a “singer” of his native Abkhazia who grew up feeding on the great­ 22 Rus­sian culture, even if he does not glorify his native land experienc- 23 ing a complex love-hate­ relationship with it instead. It is easier to call 24 a writer, for example, a “Russophone Kabardin author” (this is how I 25 was called by one of the label-loving­ literary critics). But these­ labels 26 are a fake. How would you define your works in this sense? 27 It seems that language is yet another touchstone in the pro­cess of 28 the post-­Soviet writers’ entering the larger world of global fiction. 29 ­There are almost no translations or it is a predicable set of figures 30 representing Rus­sian fiction abroad. oreover,M translations are often 31 inadequate ­because multilingualism and multiculturalism are barely 32 pos­si­ble to translate. Lit­er­a­ture in this sense is an incon­ve­nient and 33 almost archaic genre in today’­ s rapidly visualizing world. It is not 34 dancing, not painting, not installation or clownery. In lit­er­a­ture 35 words still rule. And this immediately problematizes any transla- 36 tion between cultures, between the worlds of values even in the post 37 Soviet space itself. Are your multilingualism and chorus narration 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 114 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 translatable from one Rus­sian into another? What is your attitude to hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Rus­sian language as a writer’s tool? 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 mamedov: Language as home?! It is an unexpected comparison . . . ​ hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 I would agree with you, if we add the adjective “ancestral.” But then 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th we would have to speak about ­those changes that took place in the 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th last quarter of a ­century in the yard of our civilization. ­Today we ­will 7 not find laundry drying on the clothesline, or cats sunbathing on the 8 roof of the communal lavatory and the mechanical doorbells went 9 out of fashion. Not only these,­ but many other things,­ comprise the 10 idea of our ancestral home. I cannot tell you when and why these­ 11 homes derailed, but I am certain that they ­were a crucial part of our 12 postcaveman civilization. 13 Con­temporary ­people have forgotten what their ancestral home is. 14 In a sense this makes them cut off from their childhood, for our ances- 15 tral home is that very shell in which our material and spiritual bodies 16 ­were carefully nurtured. It is not only the language we wer­ e ­going to 17 use when communicating with ­others, but also the language which we 18 learned to use when speaking with ourselves, the language of our meta- 19 physical self or the language to which we entrust ourselves for the rest 20 of our life. Your ancestral home is also your first library, the literal link 21 with ancestors who lived and died in ­these walls, and the seven drafts 22 and the first dreams and every­thing ­else without which lit­er­a­ture and 23 art would maybe survive but become mediocre and middlebrow.One 24 can move to another continent, but when one knows that somewhere 25 ­there is this ancestral home, one still lives and sees the world in a par­ 26 tic­u­lar way. The book indeed stopped to play the role it used to play 27 only recently. Ther­ e is no home as a home and no library as a library 28 anymore. The book is sent into a cloud storage or a memory-stick.­ 29 Our language could not help changing with the emergence of in- 30 ternet and social media . . . ​­There is less and less need for the rich- 31 ness of language, while its development and mastering require too 32 much time and effort. And it is not practical. Then it is better to mas- 33 ter other languages. We need a second and third language to get more 34 information and share it with our “friends,” without experiencing any 35 linguistic barrier while travelling, feeling ourselves protected. The lan- 36 guage of con­temporary lit­er­a­ture consists of a number of linguistic 37 clichés and formulas at best. I would call them the ribs of language. 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 115 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th And it happens not because­ every­one has suddenly become ardent 2 adherents of linguistic norms and wants to report their work to phi- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 lologists who would in their turn hasten to correct all the mistakes­ . It hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 is just that souls are more and more fading out. And this is the cradle hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 of all literary trash. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 You are right that lit­er­a­ture has become outdated in ­today’s 7 quickly visualizing world. I think that cinema, painting, and plastic 8 arts have also been challenged, but in a less serious way. Yet they ­will 9 not escape this fate with time. Our eye is also an instrument, directly 10 linked with our intellect and soul . . . ​Simplification and flattening 11 refer to con­temporary translations as well. ­People who speak fluent 12 En­glish may easily not know who is Philip Sidney or Ben Johnson. 13 They may not know who John Donne is. But I am sure they ­will eas- 14 ily find their way to Heathrow airport. Impor­tant cultural codes and 15 keys are being lost . . . No​ ­matter how ingenious the translation is, it 16 cannot possibly re­create all the subtleties of the original, it can only 17 give us a bunch of keys. The rest depends on the reader. 18 Several times there­ ­were preparations to translate my prose into 19 German and Turkish. They say there­ are even some drafts of trans- 20 lations of my stories. I take it calmly. I am not sure at all that my 21 works could be translated at least on any acceptable level. For this to 22 happen, it is necessary that the translator knows Russian­ lit­er­a­ture 23 and culture very well, as well as Russian­ colloquial and literary lan- 24 guage and, most importantly, is ­really keen on the author he is ­going 25 to translate. This is the minimum. And I am not sure that anyone 26 anywhere is so feverish about my prose . . . ​I do not need just some 27 translations. I can live without them. 28 I discovered my language by chance. Sometime in the late 1980s, I 29 was listening to Radio Freedom. In some cultural program they wer­ e 30 discussing a prize winning novel by a Corsican writer delivered in 31 non-­normative French. The custodians of the purity of the French 32 language ­were enraged whereas the readers loved the book. Then I 33 understood the legitimacy of my Russian,­ not the one I was learning 34 at school, and not the one I am speaking in Moscow or am trying to 35 write in now, but the one which was spoken in Baku, by the whole­ 36 street or just the inhabitants of our yard, the Rus­sian that was spo- 37 ken by the Bakinian Spring. And after­ this random discovery I wrote 38 “Weddings” and they then pulled all other works.

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 116 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 “Weddings” was the first short-­story noticed by the critics. In- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th spired by the literary bureaucrats they attempted to send me to the 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th division of national authors. This was prob­ably easier and safer for 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th them—­the critics are dependent ­people ­after all. But I refused this 4 offer and pretended that I did not hear it. And of course I found my- 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th self outside of the national mainstream. Judging by the fact that many 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th years have passed since then and each of us was left with what we 7 have and what we are, I think that such a state of affairs is con­ve­nient 8 for both me and ­those who control our con­temporary lit­er­a­ture. But 9 I would not like for my words to be interpreted as some accusation. 10 Let us finish with a Latin sayingSuum cuique [May all get their due]. 11 May this overused Latin truth resonate once again. Especially that it 12 refers to more than just literary affairs. 13 14 tlostanova: How do you see the ­future of Russia,­ and does it have 15 a ­future at all? 16 mamedov: Prophesy is a thankless task and can be even dangerous 17 at times. First, prophesies are seldom accurate and almost always 18 need to be ­later edited by the contemporaries. Second, it is a certain 19 kind of programming—­you attune ­people to a par­tic­u­lar development 20 of events. And a person should be ­free from anyone’s interference. 21 ­People should see themselves in the ­future, realize their roles, and 22 construct them according to their own princi­ples and experience, and 23 not ­those imposed by Kremlin ideologies. Rus­sia prob­ably does have 24 a ­future, but it would hardly be similar to how a decent person imag- 25 ines it. ­Human world lives according to Karmic laws and no one can 26 change this. In other words, what goes around comes around. Every­ 27 thing returns to you. We are aware of what exactly have we planted 28 since the USSR collapsed. I say “we” ­because it is a collective karma. 29 Rus­sia is not a young country, even if many historians think so and 30 impose their vision onto the society. They say that we still have time 31 to correct ourselves, that we are still green and young. We are having 32 fun. Rus­sia is “having fun” with all the associated consequences. 33 Nikolay Berdyaev singled out five periods in Rus­sian history: Kiev, 34 Tatar, Moscow, Petersburg and Bolshevik. I believe that since 1991 35 we have lived in the sixth Russia.­ Evidently at some historical junc- 36 ture we, our ancestors had worked out the fifth Russian­ karma, but 37 not completely it seems because­ we never used this historical chance 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 117 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th [to become a fr­ ee and just society]. ­Today’s époque of restoration and 2 recoil is a proof. The sixth Russia­ had not even ­shaped itself properly hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 yet when it already started to look back at the fifth period in its most hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 unfortunate manifestations which are used as our templates ­today. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 Can we stop this pro­cess? I do not know. I only know that such pro­ hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 cesses are usually stopped at the cost of incredible sacrifices. Is it 7 pos­si­ble to avoid them? It prob­ably is if the society and the power are 8 both mature enough to induce and accept the changes . . . ​But in- 9 stead we witness the opposite pro­cesses. In the best scenario it would 10 bring a slow dying.­ And then the sixth Russia­ would turn out to be 11 shorter than the fifth. owH much shorter? It is better to pray for the 12 country and for ourselves than tell fortunes. 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 118 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Why are ye ­silent? Cry, Long live the tsar Dimítry Ivánovich! 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th (The ­People are ­silent.) 4 —Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 CONCLUSION 12 13 14 15 ­People Are ­Silent . . . 16 17 18 19 20 21 I started this book with a rather pessimistic analy­sis of the futureless ontol- 22 ogy reigning in the vast spaces of external imperial difference and its mul- 23 tiple colonial otherness. The futureless ontology leaves us with no hope 24 indeed, ­unless we delink from one of modernity’s favorite deceptions—­ 25 that of the necessarily happy future­ —­and decide to perform instead a radi- 26 cal return to the past that, to quote Zapatistas through Rolando Vázquez 27 (2015), disrupts the hegemony of modernity. In Amerindian tempo-­local 28 models, the past is in front of us rather than ­behind us. It is not frozen 29 and dead, closed and museumized. It is a living and breathing temporality 30 that we know, in contrast with the unknown ­future, and this awareness 31 is radically affecting our lives, offering a well of alternatives and giving us 32 strength to live in the present­ and build our future­ . Therefore, it is crucial 33 to reflect first on our uses of the troubled pasts if we intend to have any 34 ­future. And this is what the former and pres­ent empires and their after- 35 maths are reluctant to allow. 36 Yet the local communities and individuals must do crucial work on mem- 37 ory, on historical traumas and restless ghosts that continue to consume us 38

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 119 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and erase our ­future. In the context of external imperial difference and 2 its multiple colonial difference it means to engage in a painstaking ­labor hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 of critical self-­reflection and cultivation of courage to admit our responsi- hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 bility for the past and the ­future. This radical delinking from the dogmas hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 of neoliberal, socialist, nationalist, and other modern/colonial discourses hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 would have to be grounded in the ac­cep­tance of the right to difference 7 as the foundational principle­ of relational ontology and ethics and in the 8 shift from the will­ to power that seems once again to be winning over 9 the “­will to life” (Dussel 2008, 78) in the contemporar­ y world as a neces- 10 sary requirement for bringing the pres­ent “defuturing” tendencies to a halt. 11 Decolonization of collective and personal memory is an extremely dif- 12 ficult task in which decolonial art, problematizing the official versions 13 of history, can play a key role. It is a painful work asking for ruthless self-­ 14 criticism. Paradoxically the colonized themselves often oppose this pro­ 15 cess. The surrogate of memory and the simulacrum of ethnic culture offered 16 to the post-­Soviet zombified nations, naturalize humiliation and cut off the 17 ability to think critically. 18 Decolonizing memories and existence through art, entails a restoration 19 of the artist’s and the audience’s agency—­their right and ability to fi­nally 20 make their own choices and decide what to remember and how; to real- 21 ize who we are and why ­were we brought into this world. Such decolonial 22 creative acts inevitably address the spatial and corporeal memory and the 23 memory of objects constantly traversing and problematizing the bound­aries 24 and leakages between ­human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. The 25 decolonial cathartic power of art then is realized through resisting and re-­ 26 existing moves as forms of embodied memories, evoking the most primal 27 affects—­sonic, visual, olfactory, tactile, causing uncontrollable avalanches 28 of previously censored remembrances that stubbornly reemerge. 29 Such decolonial work could potentially result in responsibility, in­de­pen­ 30 dence, freedom, and maturity. And it should take place on dif­fer­ent levels, 31 including the level of intellectuals’ carefully analyzing and reflecting on 32 decolonial social movements rather than imposing ready-made­ solutions 33 and tailored models on them. However, social movements and politi­ ­cal 34 society at large in contemporar­ y post-­Soviet states—­both postcolonial and 35 postimperial—­are notoriously weak, demoralized, and marginalized, if 36 they exist at all. Are ­there any remaining channels for decolonial poten- 37 tialities in the space of the external imperial difference and its multiple 38 colonial differences then? Once again, art seems to be one of the very few

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 120 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 fig. conc.1 Egor Rogalev, Situation No. 15. Kiev, 2014. Archival photographic print in 17 vari­ous editions; dimensions variable. From the photo series Synchronicity. Courtesy of the artist. 18 19 20 such channels. According to Ca­rib­bean writer Wilson Harris (1995, 378), in 21 colonial spaces history is often buried in the art of imagination. It is only 22 through allegories, symbols, and meta­phors that we can tell an alternative 23 narrative and not be killed or incarcerated. Yet, as discussed earlier, meta­ 24 phorical expressions are also strangely more effective than bare facts­ because 25 they call directly to our emotions and sensibilities thus launching a painful 26 pro­cess of mental­ and existential liberation. And the first steps of this process­ 27 are already vis­i­ble in the works of many artists touched upon in this book. 28 Immanuel Kant (1996 [1684]) famously defined the Enlightenment as 29 “man’s emergence from his self-­imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to 30 use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is 31 self-­imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision 32 and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance.” 33 Kant’s definition is surprisingly fitting for the post-­Soviet situation of vol- 34 untary self-­colonization by vari­ous nationalist and imperial dogmas and 35 myths keeping the population enchanted and therefore enslaved. 36 Reflecting on similar prob­lems, but ­doing it from the underside of mo- 37 dernity, Frantz Fanon (1963, 316) doubted the ability of humanity to grow 38

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218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 121 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th up and take responsibility for the world and for itself, yet he endorsed 2 the necessity for the ­people of the global South stop imitating Eu­rope hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 and catching up with it, and start “inventing and making discoveries” to hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 “advance humanity a step further.” Yet Fanon’s call has largely remained a hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 dream; as he analyzed the psychoses and neuroses of victims and torturers hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 in the Algerian War of In­de­pen­dence, Fanon himself had to admit that it 7 was hardly pos­si­ble for them to become ­free of vio­lence. “Their ­future is 8 mortgaged,” he wrote (Fanon 1963, 22). 9 Is this also true of the external imperial difference then? Are we forever 10 marked by the apathy and inertia of the raped slave for whom the only escape 11 could be into a “phenomenological disappearance” (Yampolsky 1999), plac- 12 ing one between death and enslavement, and ultimately making us invis- 13 ible once again inside and outside the repressive system? One of the most 14 talented and relentless critics of the Russian­ paradigm of vio­lence, the late 15 film director Aleksei German (2008), formulated this diagnosis even more 16 harshly: “We are a raped, a prison-bitched­ country, and we forgave and for- 17 got our humiliation and did not repent, did not ask for any retribution.” 18 The main decolonial task for the former Soviet spaces, then, is precisely 19 to overcome this per­sis­tent paradigm of vio­lence, humiliation, and dispens- 20 ability of ­human lives, and to find the courage to realize the extent of our 21 bondage and start on the long and hard path away from fear and vio­lence 22 back to ourselves. This would mean learning not only to resist but also, most 23 impor­tant, to re-­exist. Rus­sian ­human rights activist Yuri Kazakov (2004, 144) 24 called this phenomenon a gene of violence—­ or one can say an apologia of 25 vio­lence—­both from above and from the bottom, from the state and from the 26 po­liti­cal opposition. This model is endlessly reproduced in dif­fer­ent po­liti­ 27 cal forms, but its essence remains the same: the totality of violence­ cancels 28 the question of ethics in po­liti­cal actions. In Kazakov’s (2004, 144) words, 29 “Post-­Soviet Rus­sia [and a number of other post-­Soviet countries] has not 30 become a country of mass repentance, the blame for its internal phlebotomy 31 has been always shifted in the mass consciousness to some ‘elites,’ at best 32 resolutely taking any personal responsibility off their shoulders. As a result, 33 in public opinion we have an explosive mixture of social (civil) dystrophy 34 and national and interethnic unrest, and fi­nally, the all-­penetrating sense 35 of injustice.” As long as this is true, de-­imperialization, and hence decoloni- 36 zation, of thinking, being, and perception ­will never take place. 37 In the introduction, I touched on some of the reasons for the feebleness 38 of the Rus­sian protests of 2011–13 and the subsequent channeling of their

122 conclusion

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 122 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 energies by those­ in power. Indeed, small-scale­ social protests are doomed hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th by definition­ because they avoid entering the po­liti­cal sphere. Likewise, 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th the nonsystemic opposition has been consistently fragmented and unsuc- 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th cessful in its exclusive focusing on politics and its refusal to deal with social 4 and economic issues.1 However, the shared protest against the fraudulent 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th presidential election was not enough to make allies of the ultra-left­ and 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th the ultra-­right, of nationalist and neoliberal groups. It is symptomatic that 7 none of the Rus­sian “Occupies” has ever attempted to cooperate with each 8 other or build co­ali­tions afterwards. 9 In the closing months of 2016 when I was writing ­these words, almost 10 three years ­after the strangling of the last protest wave, it has become 11 clear that the wars in Ukraine and Syria could no longer help the Russian­ 12 regime distract ­people’s attention from growing economic instability and 13 social unrest. Parliamentary elections in September 2016 demonstrated 14 the ­actual crisis of legitimacy and the real attitude of citizens towar­ d 15 ­those in power. The majority of Rus­sians simply ignored the election, 16 which had rec­ord low turnouts. ­People do not believe elections can be 17 used as a ­factor of change, and they refuse to be part of the election farce 18 as well. The remaining low percentage of ­those who voted was comprised 19 of completely dependent ­people—­pensioners, students, prison inmates, 20 soldiers, employees of state organizations—­ ­who did not have even a min- 21 imal choice. 22 Oppositional politi­ ­cal scientist Andrey Piontkovsky wrote on Septem- 23 ber 21, 2016 at Kasparov.ru oppositional internet portal: 24 25 Absence from the elections is a conscious form of expressing your 26 ­attitude to power and its fake procedures. . . . It​ has become an inter- 27 national meme that Putin is supported by 86 ­percent of the popula- 28 tion.​ . . . But what is support? It is a readiness to die for him at the 29 barricades if someone attempts to displace him. Let us not require so 30 much. ­There is a minimum degree of pos­si­ble support—to show up 31 at the election and vote for your leader’s party. If one is not capable of 32 ­doing this what kind of adherent of Putin is he then? Voting is an indi- 33 rect but rather accurate opinion poll. . . . ​The turnout was 36 ­percent, 34 and the United Rus­sia got 40 ­percent. This means that Putin’s real rat- 35 ing is 14 ­percent rather than 86 ­percent. (Piontkovsky 2016) 36 To me this change is an indication of another impor­tant phenomenon that 37 is crucial for the emergence of decolonial drives in the space of external 38

conclusion 123

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 123 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 fig. conc.2 Egor hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 Rogalev, Situation hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 No. 7. Kiev, 2009. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Archival photo- 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th graphic print in 5 vari­ous editions; hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 dimensions varia- 7 ble. From the photo 8 series Synchronic- 9 ity. Courtesy of the artist. 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 imperial difference. To put it simply, it is the phenomenon of silence as a 25 po­liti­cal position, or even silence as a form of re­sis­tance and a promise of 26 re-­existence. South-­African Nobel Prize laureate J.M. Coetzee in his post- 27 colonial rereading of Daniel Defoe’s famous novel fantasizes of Robinson 28 Crusoe cutting off Friday’s tongue for being arrogant and therefore doom- 29 ing him forever to silence and inability to be born and become himself 30 (Coetzee 1986). Yet it is also pos­si­ble that Friday remains opaque of his 31 own ­will and simply refuses to speak with Robinson. In the case of many 32 post-­Soviet/postcolonial groups, such a silence can be also a form of re­ 33 sis­tance and a first step in the direction of egainingr their true sense of 34 selfhood, their long-­suffering­human dignity that has always been a target 35 of colonial and neoco­ ­lo­nial rulers. The damage is not irreparable. For all 36 of us who ­were, and sometimes still are, colonized by the Russian/Soviet/ 37 post-­Soviet empires, the path, again, ­will be long and complex, and we are 38 at the start. Yet ­there is hope of re-­existence.

124 conclusion

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 124 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 Silence understood as a way of re­sis­tance reverberates with Alexander hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Pushkin’s controversial, Shakespearian historical drama Boris Godunov 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th (1918 [1825]), which famously ends with the death of Tsar Boris; the rise 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th to power of the so-­called False Dmitry; and the beginning of the period of 4 unrest ­after which the Romanov dynasty came to power. The closing line 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th of the play has been a subject of many conflicting interpretations, from an 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th essentialist proof of Rus­sians’ slavish nature to seeing silence as a tangible 7 realization of anger and an elementary form of confrontation. After­ all, the 8 ­people who have just learned of the assassination of the previous ruler’s 9 ­family by the new tsar, and who are invited to praise theFalse Dmitry, re- 10 spond to this call with terrified silence rather than obedience. The ques- 11 tion is, How much fear and how much re­sis­tance does this silence contain? 12 In the pres­ent context of the post-­Soviet silences I prefer to interpret 13 this phenomenon as an intermediate position of neither-nor,­ of no more 14 and not yet, from which a re-­existence can still be born if some of the de- 15 colonial drives have a chance to evolve in the near future­ . Wendy Brown 16 (1996, 197) refers to this intermediate state in an inter­ ­est­ing way: “The 17 historical-­political place of silence for collective subjects emerging into 18 history is this crossed one—a­ place of potentially pleasur­ ­able reprieve in 19 newly acquired zones of freedom and privacy, yet a place of ‘freedom from,’ 20 that is not yet freedom to make the world.” 21 This disquieting yet promising note of silence is the firsthumble ­ step 22 ­toward ­future re-­existence. This tendency once again is represented most 23 graphically in post-Soviet­ art with the two examples from which I would 24 like to wrap up this book. The first one represents the trajectory of the main- 25 stream homogenizing actionist tradition, stemming from the space of the 26 imperial difference and thus erasing many significant nuances. The second 27 is an example of decolonial art, growing from the exteriority of colonial 28 otherness and focusing on the nuances of difference and intersections of 29 suppressions. 30 The first example is found in the works of the per­for­mance artist Pyotr 31 Pavlensky, which are known and understood worldwide due to their poster-­ 32 like actionist simplicity and straightforward message: the strug­gle with the 33 regime’s most recognizable features, such as censorship and shrinking free- 34 dom of speech and expression for artists, as well as other citizens. Such was 35 his Seam (2012), in which Pavlensky stitched his own mouth shut with a 36 coarse thread and stood for a long time in a picket line in front of Saint Pe- 37 tersburg’s Kazan Cathedral to protest the incarceration of members of the 38

conclusion 125

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 125 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th feminist punk band Pussy Riot. In his famous Fixation (2013), the naked 2 artist, in the best tradition of corporeal actionism, nailed his own scrotum hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 to Red Square to protest the apathy and fatality of con­temporary Rus­sian hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 society. Fi­nally, in Threat (2015), Pavlensky, in an act of public arson, set hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 fire to the doors of the Lubyanka Building, headquarters of the kgb. This hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 action resulted in a trial, and a disproportionately large fine was comically 7 imposed on him for damaging the historically valuable building in which 8 many prominent Rus­sian cultural and societal figures ­were incarcerated 9 or tortured. Pavlensky’s art is no doubt radical and politi­ ­cal. But it is also 10 contained entirely within the realm of the immediate pres­ent and there- 11 fore is hardly decolonial. It falls instead into the paradigm of the futureless 12 ontology (Walker 2014). 13 Aslan Gaisumov’s decolonial works are less straightforward and simpli- 14 fied. They are multi-­semantic and open to dif­fer­ent interpretations and 15 vari­ous temporalities, ­because they are not fixed in the actionist metaphys- 16 ics of the presence, but try instead to reflect on the multiple pasts, without 17 which ­there is no present­ or future­ . Gaisumov sees silence as an embryo of 18 suppressed but survived re­sis­tance. He also focuses on the radical return 19 in the form of placing the ­actual material archive of his denied past in a 20 Eu­ro­pean museum as a dual gesture of setting himself ­free from the trau- 21 mas of that past, yet at the same time, legitimating that past and making it 22 impossible to deny. 23 ­These ­were the two main themes of the latest works shown at Gaisu- 24 mov’s personal exhibition at the Antwerp Museum of Contemporar­ y Art in 25 the summer of 2016 (“In Situ” 2016). The first work, the video installation 26 ­People of No Consequence, is a reflection on the fate of the­ dying generation 27 of Chechens who went through deportation in 1944 return in 1957, force- 28 ful amnesia and, several decades­ ­later, another series of Russian­ military 29 campaigns that turned them into exiles and refugees once again in one short 30 lifetime. Gaisumov gathered the el­derly ­people whose lives went between 31 ­these two exiles in an old Soviet ­house of culture that miraculously survived 32 ­after many bombings and the subsequent construction boom of the pres­ent 33 Chechen administration. The artist filmed­these ­silent old ­people as they sat 34 in the big hall and looked at its empty stage with fear, hope, anxiety, indif- 35 ference, doom, and stubborn dignity in an attempt to capture the quintes- 36 sence of their several de­cades of silence. The eyes, body movements, and 37 postures of ­these ­people “of no consequence” betray their broken, intimi- 38 dated, and humiliated condition. Yet they also reveal quiet happiness in

126 conclusion

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 126 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 being alive and back at home, even if only to die. Although they could not hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th forget what was done to them, they ­were forbidden to remember or tell 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th their stories. But I am not quick to condemn them for their reluctance to 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th rebel. Having buried in the depths of collective unconsciousness the many 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th “colonial wounds” (Anzaldúa 1999, 25), the unfinished repentances and re- 5 venges, the halfway decolonizations, they came to ­today’s ­bitter humility 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and voluntary oblivion for lack of other choices. But their silence (or rather, 7 a tacit consent not to discuss certain historical events) is not necessarily just 8 a sign of colonized minds and bodies. Rather, it is a form of psychological 9 self-­defense or repression vacillating between amnesia and rejection. But it 10 is not a final chord and not a requiem as long asth­ ere are artists like Gaisu- 11 mov and wider, ­people of his generation who are willing to discuss ­these si- 12 lences and relentlessly remind us of them in spite of all the efforts of official 13 narratives to erase ­these lives of no consequence from history. 14 Gaisumov’s second work, House­hold, consists of a big crate full of every- 15 day objects, clothes, utensils, articles necessary for survival—in short all 16 the real material ­things that the artist’s ­family actually used during their 17 long refugee life. It is a materialized past carefully packed and sent to the 18 museum. The symbolism of this work is historically relational as it is an act 19 of not even writing but sending back to the center. The deported Chech- 20 ens who ­were dehumanized to the point of being completely objectified 21 ­were sent to Central Asia in cargo and ­cattle cars. Gaisumov’s reciprocal 22 gesture of sending the meager objects of his ­family’s homeless existence 23 to a museum to finally­ get rid of embodied memories by making this past 24 public and objectified and to prevent any further disembodiment and eras- 25 ing of its palpable materiality is a decolonial radical return that functions 26 on several levels at once. The artist who used to be in the position of a 27 live object himself, remembers a similar destiny of his ancestors and com- 28 memorates this negative lineage capable of triggering emancipating drives 29 and sensibilities through the parcel containing the embodied past. At the 30 museum for permanent storage, the crates serve as a marker of the end of 31 his refugee existence and an attempt to deposit the processed­ past that he 32 wants to let go but not erase. 33 In this complex, multilayered, contradictory, and dynamic gesture that, 34 unlike Pavlensky’s works, is not confined to the metaphysics of the pres­ent 35 but always communicates with the multiple living pasts, ­there is still hope 36 for the creation of an alternative real­ity, a faith in re-­existence. It is a for- 37 ever open ending that refuses to dot the “i”s and therefore leaves us at least 38

conclusion 127

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 127 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th some options. Its radical return, together with the forever unfinished na- 2 ture of constant becoming, makes Gaisumov’s works truly decolonial. Even hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 in the darkest moment, one of which we are experiencing now, freedom hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 and dignity still prevail—at least, in the realm of decolonial transcendence hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 of modernity/coloniality through the medium of art. This is already enough hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 to cherish a hope. 7 A merciless purging of the ­grand imperial myths, with their inhumane, 8 unsightly colonial lining, and a decolonizing of collective and personal 9 memory are the only remaining paths to any positive ­future that ­will not 10 be stuck with imperial difference. It is hard to imagine this ­future ­today 11 from the midst of the darkest imperial moment of its imminent death and 12 its stubborn clinging to life. Yet I do hope that even the phantom pains 13 of the amputated empire will­ recede sooner than we imagine and a com- 14 pletely dif­fer­ent geopolitics and corpo-­politics of knowledge, being, and 15 perception would (re)emerge. Multiple dependencies and intersections of 16 oppression require a complex purification, in which the affective mech- 17 anisms are no less but more impor­tant than rational arguments. And the 18 decolonial art, on which I mainly concentrated in this book acts as one of 19 the most powerful­ agents of decoloniality and provides promising ways to 20 prepare for and build the ­future. 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

128 conclusion

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 128 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 notes 12 13 14 15 introduction 16 1. The term “colonial difference” refers to the complex differential between empires 17 and their colonies. Colonial difference is studied much more thoroughly than imperial 18 difference in postcolonial theory and decolonial thought. Although the empire-­colony 19 dichotomy has been criticized time and again for its black-­and-­white simplicity, and 20 a number of thinkers have attempted to complicate and problematize this binary in 21 more dynamic reciprocal forms (see, e.g., Bhabha 1994; Ortiz 1995), the colonial differ- ence in general has remained the most obvious, visual, and immediate repre­sen­ta­tion 22 of the power dynamics of modernity/coloniality. 23 Imperial difference disrupts the presumable homogeneity of imperial spatiality 24 and complicates it by drawing attention to vari­ous complete or partial losers that, for 25 vari­ous reasons, failed to fulfill their imperial missions in the post-­Enlightenment 26 modernity. As a result, they occupied second-or even third-­class places within the 27 modern imperial hierarchy and increasingly competed among themselves rather than with the winners. Occasional attempts to move up from the second division to the 28 first, an in­ter­est­ing example of which was the USSR, invariably have been prevented 29 and punished by the first-­class imperial powers. Even if they retained economic and 30 po­liti­cal in­de­pen­dence, the losing empires ­were colonized intellectually, culturally, 31 and existentially, often via efficient self-­colonizing tools. 32 Similarly to colonial difference, which is sustained through the paradox of an 33 essentially unattainable ideal of pro­gress and an ultimate merging with imperial sameness, the sphere of imperial difference has repeatedly slid into an endless logic of 34 catching up. Second-­class empires have developed collective inferiority complexes and 35 unhealthy compensating mechanisms, as well as besieged-­camp ideologies and victory-­ 36 in-­defeat myths. Not incidentally, the liminal empires marked by imperial difference 37 ­were located in Eurasia, which contains the most complex cultural, ethnic, religious, 38

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 129 1/16/18 5:25 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th and economic intersections and nodal points. Usually ­these empires lacked impor­ 2 tant features of the successful modern imperial profile, such as Western Christian­ ­ hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 ity, increasingly in its Protestant forms; capitalism, increasingly in its industrial, not hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 mercantile, va­ri­e­ties; racial hierarchies that easily distinguished between subjects and hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th so-­called ­others; and last, but not least, the alphabetical and linguistic affinity, which 5 seriously affected symbolic belonging to the ruling club. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 2. I coined the term “Janus-­faced empire” in the early 2000s in an attempt to explain 7 the neurotic Rus­sian imperial configuration as a polity that has never been allowed into 8 the Western club but secretly, or openly, wants to be accepted. ­Today, the “Tatar dressed 9 as a Frenchman,” as the Rus­sian imperial historian Vasily Klyuchevsky (2009) has 10 described this identity, is lapsing into yet another chauvinistic cycle by bragging about its exaggerated “Asiatic” qualities. The devious and unreliable imperial Russian­ Janus 11 has also been manipulative and strangely adaptable to dif­fer­ent conditions, success- 12 fully imitating and appropriating other imperial models to balance its difficult divided 13 positionality. 14 An imperial paradox, this Janus has been rich yet poor, providential yet failed, 15 and always struggling and never quite succeeding in appropriating certain ele­ments 16 of modernity/coloniality. To survive, it has had to wear dif­fer­ent masks for dif­fer­ent partners—­European and non-­European. In a way, in the presence of Western Eu­ 17 rope it has always felt like a colony and compensated for this by projecting an image 18 of the Rus­sian/Soviet colonizer as a champion of civilization, modernization, and, 19 ­later, specifically socialist modernity into its own non-­European colonies. Moreover, 20 a complex internal hierarchy of intercolonial differences generated a variety of masks 21 the empire wore to address each of the colonies. When Rus­sia/the USSR was looking 22 in the direction of its Eu­ro­pean frontiers (Finland, Poland, the Baltic littoral), it acted like an unconfident colonizer that was unable to practice imperial superiority or carry 23 out civilizing missions ­because of its own lower position in the hierarchy of modernity. 24 Looking to the East and to the South—­the only remaining directions for its imperial 25 expansion in the post-­Enlightenment modern era, Rus­sia/the USSR wore a dif­fer­ent 26 mask: that of a distorted “white man’s burden,” which Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1977, 35) 27 described when he wrote, “In Eu­rope we ­were hangers-on and slaves, whereas in Asia 28 we ­shall go as masters.” A special case of the complex interplay of the external imperial and colonial differences in the Janus-­faced empire was represented in Rus­sia’s relations 29 with the intermediary cases of Ukraine and Belarus, whose difference was deliberately 30 erased and silenced to enhance the insecure Rus­sian sameness. The inconfident Rus­ 31 sian imperial identity asserted itself by denying the existence and forcefully assimilat- 32 ing ­these East Slavic ethnic cultures. 33 3. Arguments about ­whether it would be better to be colonized by ­Great Britain or 34 by Rus­sia and self-­defensive statements about how lucky we are that we do not live in Af­ghan­i­stan are typical illustrations of this sensibility in Central Asia. 35 4. “Make food for powder” is an idiom used by William Shakespeare in Henry IV. 36 Falstaff says: “good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder;they’ll ­ fill a pit as 37 well as better.” It is normally used to describe combatants who are cynically treated as 38 unimportant lives who are easily sacrificed on the battlefield.

130 notes to introduction

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 130 1/16/18 5:26 PM PROOF 1 5. La Leyenda Negra (The Black Legend) was originally a biased repre­sen­ta­tion of hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Spain in the historiography of its more successful Eu­ro­pean imperial rivals (Greer, 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Quilligan, Mignolo 2008). ­Here it is used to denote a general style of argumentation 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th meant to demonize the adversary to construct a positive self-­representation, habitually 4 used in geopo­liti­cal rivalry. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6. Immigration has reached unpre­ce­dented numbers in Rus­sia in the past several 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th years and continues to grow. The latest wave has been more politi­ ­cally than eco­nom­ 6 ically induced—or, at least, the two ­factors play equal roles. In a sense, the regime is 7 using the still open borders as a safety valve, to let off the steam. If dissidents, who also 8 tend to be highly educated professionals, are able to leave and are ­doing so, the threat 9 of revolution is considerably reduced. 10 7. In the months that passed between writing the first draft and the final version of this book, many more social and economic protests ­were taking place in the Rus­ 11 sian provinces (but not so much in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, with an impor­tant 12 exception of the school ­children and students dominated revolts in the spring of 2017). 13 Among them was the Krasnodar farmers’ march on the Kremlin in the late summer of 14 2016, which was stopped abruptly and violently persecuted at a ­great distance from 15 Moscow. The farmers, driving tractors, ­were protesting unlawful seizures of land and 16 harvests by large businesses supported by corrupt local bureaucrats and police, which ­were leaving thousands of ­people bankrupt. Another example is the strike by truck 17 ­drivers that was renewed on a massive scale in the spring of 2017 against the Platon 18 electronic toll system, which assesses fees based on the weight of a truck’s cargo and 19 could lead to economic ruin for many truckers who own and operate their vehicles as 20 in­de­pen­dent contractors. 21 In ­these and other protests, the protesters have wanted to take their social and 22 economic claims directly to the president; they believe that he is not aware of the iniquity that is being created and that, once he finds out, he ­will restore justice. Thus, 23 rather than Rus­sian government, the protesters target local officials or the West as 24 their ­enemy. This reflects the stale Rus­sian foundational po­liti­cal myth of the good tsar 25 and the bad boyars that played such an impor­tant part in Stalinist times. Paradoxically, 26 ­these protests are pro-­Putin. 27 chapter 1. The Decolonial Sublime 28 1. Rancière titled one of his latest books Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of 29 Art (2013). However, in many ways it reiterates his original take on aesthetics. 30 2. Similarly to other concepts, creolization, which was originally coined outside the 31 West and linked with par­tic­u­lar local histories, was fruitfully theorized in the Ca­rib­ 32 bean tradition and ­later appropriated by Western theory as a fash­ion­able term. It was 33 subsequently used in mainstream texts mostly in its positive and quite superfluous 34 interpretations, celebrating the fusion of cultural forms and their egalitarian interac- tion. In this case, per­sis­tent power hierarchies in the production of cultural patterns 35 and the absorption and deformation of dependent cultures by dominant cultures, are 36 virtually ignored. Paradoxically, in celebrating creolization Bourriaud appropriates 37 and distorts it, erasing its asymmetries, painful strug­gles, and ele­ment of re­sis­tance. 38

notes to chapter 1 131

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 131 1/16/18 5:26 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th Instead, he sees a smooth and continuous blending of every­thing and every­one in some 2 anti-­hierarchical altermodern space, which exists only in his own head. As a result, hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 “creolization” turns into a floating or empty signifier, a signbehind­ which nothing lies. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 I prefer a dif­fer­ent understanding of “creolization,” which is represented, among hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th other sources, in The Creolization of Theory, edited by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei­ 5 Shih: “The strength of the concept arises directly from its historical specificity. As a hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 pro­cess that registers the history of slavery, plantation culture, colonization, settlement, 7 forced migration, and most recently, the uneven global circulation of labor,­ creolization 8 describes the encounter among ­peoples in a highly stratified terrain. So it is not just any 9 transculturation but ‘forced transculturation’ ” (Lionnet and Shih 2011, 25). 10 3. ­Here transmodernity is understood in Enrique Dussel’s sense. He juxtaposes it to postmodernity and sees it as an alternative yet utopian space of thinking and acting 11 (Dussel 2002). We could widen this juxtaposition to include Bourriaud’s altermoder- 12 nity, as well. Transmodernity overcomes modernity from the position of exteriority or 13 border thinking instead of continuing its endless internal critique, which never prob- 14 lematizes the Eurocentric universalist progressivist totality of modernity as such. In the 15 mechanism of the decolonial sublime, it is especially impor­tant that, in the pro­cess of 16 delinking and subsequent re-­existence, modernity be ultimately overcome. 17 chapter 2. Post-­Soviet Art 18 1. ­After 2010, the National Bolsheviks formed the core of a wider opposition politi­ ­ 19 cal alliance known The Other Rus­sia. 20 2. Although Dugin was originally a member of Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshe- 21 vik Party, their paths soon diverged. ­Today Dugin represents the farthest-­right, most 22 statist, most fundamentalist discourse; although it has very ­little to do with the original concept of Eurasianism, it borrows the name and accentuates the nationalist and impe- 23 rial sides of the sanctified geopolitics. Dugin is notoriously ridiculed for his advance- 24 ment of the aggressive revanchist dream of the planetary geopo­liti­cal revenge presided 25 by Rus­sia, ­after which the lost and “hidden meta-­continents ­will emerge from the 26 depths of the past” and “geopolitics ­will become a sacred geography” (Dugin 1996, 36). 27 In contrast with Limonov, who has been banned and persecuted, Dugin stands very 28 close to the pres­ent Rus­sian administration, often acting as a mouthpiece for populist imperial rhe­toric. 29 3. Bombily blog, http://­halfaman​.­livejournal​.­com​/­. 30 4. E​-­mail to the author, January 31, 2016. 31 5. Guslitsa is a former textile factory not far from Moscow that was built by local 32 businessmen named Petrashov in 1908. It was abandoned and damaged in the post-­ 33 Soviet years but in 2012 was bought by a ­family of businessmen who turned it into 34 an art, cultural, and exhibition center; artists’ residence; and home for several social movements and local community initiatives. In 2016, however, the artists, social activ- 35 ists, entrepreneurs, and ­owners of Guslitsa ­were forced out by so-­called raiders, who 36 attempted to turn the fa­cil­i­ty into a ware­house. Luckily the artists ­were eventually able 37 to defend their creation. 38 6. E-­mail to the author, January 31, 2016.

132 notes to chapter 1

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 132 1/16/18 5:26 PM PROOF 1 7. E-­mail to the author, January 31, 2016. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 8. E-­mail to the author, January 31, 2016. 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 9. The Uzbek director Nazim Abbasov’s filmEternity (2005), which focuses on the 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th potters’ craft and lifestyle, provides in­ter­est­ing, poetic documentation of such a surviv- 4 ing indigenous cosmological tradition as expressed through art. hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 10. See Laura Bulian Gallery, http://­www​.­laurabuliangallery​.­com​/­index​.­html. 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 11. E​-­mail to the author, November 5, 2010. 6 12. E-­mail to the author, November 5, 2010. 7 8 chapter 4. Vyacheslav Akhunov 9 1. Alexander Volkov (1886–1957) was a Rus­sian avant-­garde artist who spent his life in 10 Uzbekistan and merged typically Central Asian topics and subjects, which he often inter- preted in Gauguinian Orientalist ways, with suprematist and cubist-­futuristic aesthetics. 11 2. From chapan, a traditional Uzbek men’s robe. The chapan is a standard souvenir 12 given to impor­tant guests in Uzbekistan as a sign of re­spect. 13 3. The exhibition took place in Saint Petersburg in February 2016 at the private gal- 14 lery Lyuda. It was titled, “You ­Will Be Living ­Under . . . .” 15 4. Akhunov refers ­here to the unique State Art Museum of the Republic of Kara- 16 kalpakstan, named ­after I. V. Savitsky, which holds the second-­largest collection of Rus­sian avant-­garde in the world. 17 5. Mukhamad Salikh (Salih) is one of the Uzbek po­liti­cal opposition leaders and a 18 poet who has po­liti­cal asylum in Norway and lives in Turkey. Repeated attempts have 19 been made to assassinate, arrest, and extradite him. 20 21 chapter 5. Afanassy Mamedov 22 1. Maxim Gorky Lit­er­a­ture Institute in Moscow. 2. The novel is Cinnabar (kinovar in Rus­sian, which links phonetically with kino, or 23 cinema) and was published in 2015 in the journal Druzhba Narodov. 24 25 conclusion 26 Epigraph: Pushkin 1918 (1825), 117. 27 1. In the protest wave of 2011–13 this fragmentation resulted in a multiplication of 28 “Occupy” groups. They chose their own urban spaces with which to be identified. The best-­known example was Occupy Abai, which hijacked the Kazakh poet’s name and 29 monument in central Moscow to stand for the strug­gle for ­human dignity and the right 30 to choose one’s destiny. 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

notes to conclusion 133

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 133 1/16/18 5:26 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

218-73357_ch01_1P.indd 134 1/16/18 5:26 PM PROOF 1 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 2 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 3 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 4 5 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 6 hn hk io il sy SY ek eh fi fl ffi ffl Th 7 8 9 10 11 references 12 13 14 15 Abbasov, Nazym. 2005. Eternity. Film. Gala-­Film Studio and National Agency Uzbek 16 Cinema, Tashkent, Uzbekistan. 17 Albán Achinte, Adolfo. 2006. Texiendo textos y saberes. Cinco hijos para pensar los 18 estudios culturales, la colonialidad y la interculturalidad. Popayán, Colombia: Editorial 19 Universidad del Cauca, Colección Estiodios (Inter)culturales. 20 —­—­—. 2009. “Artistas indígenas y afrocolombianos: Entre las memorias y las cosmo- visiones. Estéticas de la re-­existencia.” In Arte y estética en la encrucijada descolonial, 21 ed. Zulma Palermo, 83–112. Buenos Aires: Del Siglo. 22 Alexievich, Svetlana. 2013. Vremya Second Hand [Second­hand Time]. Moscow: Vremya. 23 Ames, Mark. 2011. “The Massacre Every­one Ignored.” The Exiled, December 19. Ac- 24 cessed September 15, 2017. http://­exiledonline​.­com​/­the​-­massacre​-­everyone​-­ignored​ 25 -­70​-­striking​-­oil​-­workers​-­killed​-­in​-­kazakhstan​-­by​-­us​-­supported​-­dictator​/­. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. ­Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of 26 Nationalism. London: Verso. 27 Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1999. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt 28 Lute. 29 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. 1750. Aesthetica. Frankfurt: Impensis. I. C. Kleyb. Ac- 30 cessed December 15, 2016. https://­archive​.­org​/­details​/­aestheticascrip00baumgoog. 31 Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002a. Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms 32 the World. New York: Lukas and Sternberg. 33 —­—­—. 2002b. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon, France: Les Presses du Reel. 34 —­—­—. 2009. Altermodern Manifesto. Tate triennial. Accessed December 15, 2016. 35 http://­www​.­tate​.­org​.­uk​/­britain​/­exhibitions​/­altermodern​/­manifesto​.­shtm. 36 Brooks, David. 2000. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got ­There. 37 New York: Simon and Schuster. 38

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